


Medical Duty

by MyDearOuroboros



Series: Medical Duty [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Drunkenness, Emotional Manipulation, Innuendo, Love/Hate, M/M, Medic!Lance, Mutual Pining, Near Future, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Space Mom Allura (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-07-25 22:34:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7549876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyDearOuroboros/pseuds/MyDearOuroboros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blue is the color of loyalty, so somehow that translates to Lance being the team medic. Except his only first aid skills come from putting bandaids on his younger siblings, and Keith seems to be physically incapable of not getting punched by every new alien they meet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

"Just hold still, all right?" 

Lance grabbed Keith's arm, tried to get him to stop wiggling while still dabbing at the scrape above his eyebrow with the isopropyl-soaked cotton ball in his other hand. Keith huffed, winced, grumbled something under his breath, but Lance was determined to fill his roll as Blue paladin. Healing and medicine evidently went with loyalty, or at least that was Coran's explanation. It's not like anyone asked Lance if hey, buddy, can you handle blood and patching up your reckless teammates with only a telepathic alien mecha as your guide? If they had, they would've gotten a resounding No, Thank you very much, hypothetical person who actually cares about Lance's point of view.

Half the stuff in the box wasn't even keyed for human biology. Admittedly, Lance knew a teeny little bit about first aid from patching up his younger siblings (or at least watching his older sister do it), but it didn't come in handy when he couldn't even read the labels in the box. Blue helped some, though; See, cotton balls and rubbing alcohol.

"Isn't that enough?" Keith tried to push his hand away, again, the little sneaker. Lance tossed aside that cottonball and dunked another in the blue anti-bac gel that Blue had directed him to, and began working on the scrape that went the whole way around Keith's jaw.

The reckless asshole was making out to be Lance's most consistent, and really only patient. Whenever the other paladins got hurt, which was beyond rare, it was always serious enough to need a cryo-pod. Keith seemed to bloody his knuckles, or get punched by some alien, or just magically fall over every few days. This time, he shoved a grumpy looking green dude of in the nunvillary Coran had dragged them to, for no apparent reason. The alien, who'd definitely had too much nunville, shoved back, and that's when Keith started punching and Lance had to step in.

Not that Lance could take Keith or his lime-toned adversary. But he figured, might as well keep all his limbs attached before Lance had that much more work to do. Lance was pretty sure Keith couldn't go three minutes without challenging someone to a fight; Usually Lance, but also most of the new alien species they'd encountered, including grumpy green lizard dudes getting drunk on alien alcohol. One of these days, he was going to try and fight a tree and get himself killed before they could defeat Zarkon, Lance just knew it.

Either way, the Mu had grabbed all three of them by the collars and tossed them summarily out the semi-transparant walls. The alien limped somewhere into the smog, and Keith followed Lance as he griped his way over to Blue. They sat on her paws now, in a gritty alien parking lot that smelled sort of like old cooking oil and bathtub gin. Not that Lance really knew what bathtub gin smelled like, but he did have an imagination, thank you very much. The entire planet smelled like prohibition.

"I told you, hold still! It'll be over in like a second, gosh," Lance unpeeled and slapped a thin transparent space-bandaid over Keith's eyebrow scrape. He wrinkled his nose, which got it bleeding again. "If you didn't almost die every time you walked outside the castle, maybe I wouldn't have to clean you up."

"You realize the castle is in space, right?" Keith said, like he was trying to be funny or something.

"So?"

"If I ever walked outside, I'd die immediately." Lance rolled his eyes. That was so obviously not what he was talking about. Keith took everything too literally, and it was starting to drive him crazy.

"Not if you had a space suit, duh."

"You just said walk outside! You're really proving my point here, you know," Keith looked so proud, like he was right or something. Lance slapped the last spaceaid on, then turned back to Blue. She had been a vague presence in his head ever since he'd found her back in the desert, but sometimes it was like she flared up, got more insistent. It wasn't telepathy, exactly, but sometimes he'd just *know* things, like Blue had beamed it straight into his head. Case in point: Keith's ribs were probably bruised, and Lance needed to wrap them up with a layer of that purple stuff in the box. He also needed to put a layer of it on his own eye, which was turning a sickly bluish green if his reflection in a local puddle was anything to go by, but Lance figured that could wait. Keith was annoying, but he was bleeding more than Lance right then, so he got some kind of priority.

"Okay, shirt off." Lance pulled the purple stuff out, it was really more of a goo, and a roll of what he was pretty sure was plastic wrap. When he looked back up, Keith's shirt was still on. "What, are you deaf now too?"

"No, I just," Keith made a little harumph with his nose. "Do you really need my shirt off?" Lance looked at him like he'd grown a second head. Keith shrugged his shoulders, looked around.

"Yeah, stupid," Lance reached out to at least get that stupid jacket, and Keith started flailing.

"Why do you always want my shirt off, anyways? Fuck off!" He batted Lance's hand away, pulled his coat back the way he wanted it, winced.

"Fine, die when your ribs finally crack and stab you in the lungs, see if I care," Lance turned to the puddle to try and smear the goo on his own eye, and was smacked across the heart with guilt almost immediately. It didn't mean he'd say he was sorry or anything, but his ears began to burn, and he managed to get goo all down his cheek.

"Let me," Keith mumbled, reaching out for the goo-jar. He looked red; under the spaceaids, but also across his cheeks, over the crest of his nose. Lance faltered, but let got enough that Keith could take the jar, scoop out a glob with his first two fingers. He moved forward, winced, so Lance leaned in to meet him, closed his eye.

It should've been awkward, Lance becoming the patient instead of the nurse (Lance as a nurse, wasn't that a thought), but kneeling in front of Keith, feeling the cool tingle of the goo seep into his eye, which he hadn't even noticed was throbbing with a deep dulling ache, it all felt sort of... nice. Nice was a good word for it. Hell, at this angle, Keith looking up at him so intensely, Lance could almost even maybe call it romantic. Maybe! He shut down that line of thought as soon as it started.

"So..." he said, "Pretty sure that's enough actually. Really glopping it on there, aren'tcha?" Keith kept his stare, pulled another huge fingerfull of purple out of the jar, and slapped it onto Lance's face, earning him a cut-off squeal from the blue paladin.

"Asshole," Keith muttered, but stripped off his jacket and began pulling his black tshirt over his head. Lance lost all connection with reality for a few seconds, but his brain booted back up eventually, and he wiped the purple out of his eye.

"Why- don't just strip it off, dude!"

"Make up your goddamn mind," Keith grouched, snapping the shirt over to Lance, who fumbled it and the jar. "Do you want to fix me up or not?"

Lance was sorely tempted to go with the second option, strangely soulful eye-contact or not, but Blue grumbled in his backbrain. He grabbed the almost forgotten roll of what really did look like plastic wrap, and began painting the purple salve over the flushing bruise that was beginning to show on the other boy's skin.

Lance knew, objectively, that Keith had muscles under his (generally black) tshirts. Hell, this wasn't the first time he'd had to wrap up a bruised rib; Keith had even broken three of them (three, Keith!) during one of their many skirmishes with the Galra force, but they'd put him in a cryo-pod for that. Communal showers after training were also a thing, and Shiro had way better pecs than any of the rest of them. Sitting in front of Keith though, painting on the salve and checking him over again, just in case, still made Lance's cheeks burn. His chest was stupidly pretty.

"Ah, um," Lance felt like he was staring. Was he staring? He was totally staring.

"Oh, yeah." Keith raised his arms, elbows out, and looked back at Lance expectantly. It took a second for his brain to come back online, but Lance managed to unwrap a large sheet of the totally-not-plastic and start gently, but firmly, winding it around Keith's stupid pretty chest. He felt like he could come up with a better insult than stupid. Pretty wasn't even technically an insult. Well, it felt like an insult whenever Keith said it in that one tone, but was he really stooping to Keith's level of banter now? No. No he wasn't.

"Are we done?" Keith snapped, his arms still held out at head level. It suddenly occurred to Lance that, bruised ribs and all, holding his arms like that had to hurt. Also that he'd put on at least three layers too many of the wrap. He fumbled trying to put a thin strand of adhesive over the seam and then pulled back.

"Put your emo shirt back on." That was better. Keith did totally have a 'MCR revival' aesthetic going on, much to Lance's ego's delight. He tossed the shirt, still laying across his knees, back at the red paladin.

"Whatever, Cargo Pilot." Ouch. Keith wasted no time dressing and standing up, fumbling around for the little packet of painkillers that they both knew was somewhere in the first aid kit. Lance snatched it from him, suddenly annoyed.

"I don't even know why I bother," he fished out the packet, tossed it. "Would a little gratitude kill you, Gerard?" Keith rolled his eyes as he dry swallowed one of the pills.

"Not as bad as your medical skills would, Sanchez." Which was frankly a terrible comeback, and Lance told him so. Keith let the packet fall into the dirty space-asphalt, disgust crossing his face, and stood up abruptly.

"Is it though? It's not like you'd even care," he got real quieter at the end, which was weird, because normally Keith ran headfirst with his stupid comebacks to Lance's witty banter. Lance looked up from trying to find the packet, but didn't quite care enough to decipher the look on the other boy's face. Keith took a step back towards the nunvillary, remembered the ban, and then started the short stalk back over to Red. Lance grabbed the packet of pills off the ground, brushing them off because eww, aggressively tossed the medical kit back together from the complete disarray Keith had left it.

"I'm the stupidest paladin," he mocked, under his breath, doing his best impression of his asshole loner teammate. "I run head first into stupid fights and then throw vital medical supplies on the ground when my amazingly loyal fellow paladin and far better fighter pilot decides to keep my guts from falling out. It's not like you'd even ca~are, Sanchez," and, Oh, that suddenly clicked into place. Lance remembered what he'd said before, and the way Keith had repeated it, and. Jeez. He looked up at Keith's slowly receding form.

He wasn't limping, exactly, but... For a boy who'd taken dramatic to an artform, Lance couldn't remember a time when he himself had put on that dejected a walk. Determined but, also slow in a way that looked unnatural. Guilt began to pool in Lance's stomach, or he'd finally begun to digest the wokfrat they'd eaten earlier. It was unpleasant, whatever it was. Keith didn't deserve, well, a lot of the shit Lance gave him. And Lance knew that, really. It was just that, well, if Lance didn't bring him down a few pegs, who would? He'd been pretty much the best fighter pilot at the Garrison since, like, forever, and now that they were in space, he still managed to be stupidly perfect at everything.

Everything except keeping himself unpunched, and not taking things Lance said way too hard. The blue paladin would lose his cool, say something that was admittedly meaner than he intended, and then Keith would make that stupid face where the space between his eyebrows got all pinched, and his mouth curdled into a tight line, and then Lance would beat himself up over it silently in his head for the rest of the day. Or not notice at all, until Pidge beat him publicly over the head later in the day, which was definitely worse.

Well, not this time. Lance was obviously in the right, and had kinda made up for it by putting Keith's ribs back in order, so he wouldn't care about it any more. The blue paladin steeled his mind and set to work clambering up Blue and shuffling around the mess in the storage panel until the kit went back in. The boy had no sense of humor, that was all. He could make himself believe that.

But. Well. Lance looked up, out of one of the side-windows, and caught sight of Keith. He was sitting on Red's nose, jacket shrugged off, bottom of his shirt clutched in his mouth, trying to re-stick the adhesive at the seam of the wrap. A corner of it flapped up in the breeze, because Lance had obviously not used enough of the medical tape stuff that would keep it all together.

With a groan, Lance pulled himself up and hopped out of Blue. She was resting on her front paws, still and statuesque in the orange tinged light. The night could have been a pleasant summer night on earth, with the breeze drifting through Lance's hair, if it weren't for the quiet din in the background from the thin-walled nunvillary, and the seeping stench of sour booze.

Keith looked like he didn't notice any of that, Lance thought as he made the short walk past Yellow and Black to Red's feet. The breeze caught in the other boy's hair just right, and though Lance himself was warm in the night air, it seemed to chill Keith, the skin over his cheeks pale and wan. He was really pretty, actually, Lance thought, in a lone wolf sort of way. For once, he didn't amend it to stupid pretty, as was the custom.

Guilt settled now down in his gut. He reached Red's feet, asked permission in his head before scrambling up her side, with none of the grace Keith had used. The red paladin looked up at him, obviously caught off guard, and pulled his shirt down sharply.

"Here," Lance said, holding up the tape. Keith looked anxious, wary. "Can I...?" Keith shrugged, winced, pulled his shirt up again. Lance fixed the seam quickly. He suddenly felt awkward, unsure. Keith scootched back towards Red's waiting windshield.

"Wait, Keith."

The other boy looked back and watched him, expectant. Words failed, Lance felt like he'd stepped straight into a spotlight, but after a few gulps for air (wasn't he smoother than this?) he managed.

"I didn't mean, what I said before, I mean?" Keith's face said he obviously had no idea what Lance meant. "I mean- gotta stop using that word -I would care. If you got hurt. When you get hurt." He couldn't look. This was terrible and he was way smoother than this, if only Keith was less out of his league, goddamn gotta stop thinking like that-

"Oh." Oh? Lance opened one eye. He wasn't sure when he'd closed them, like he was waiting to get hit. Keith looked... confused, almost. Contemplative. "Uh, I care too. I guess."

Silence stretched out, painfully. Lance started to come up with something terribly witty, but Keith beat him to it. The red paladin finished his retreat into Red's waiting cabin, and vanished in the depths of his lion.

Lance sucked his teeth, nodded. That went... pretty much how he'd expected, actually. He slid over the side of Red's snout, jumped down with no more grace than his ascent, and slowly plodded back to his own waiting mecha. He didn't feel the eyes that tracked him as he pulled himself up and leaned back against her windshield to wait out the rest of the team.


	2. Welcome to Space New Jersey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A month later, and a few planets over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bear with me. This may not look like it has anything to do with the first chapter (which is now a prologue) but it does, promise! All in the same AU. Not much Klance yet but we're getting there, really.

Nothing ever good happened when the Galra were this quiet, Allura thought as she scanned the map for emergency beacons. It’s not that there weren’t any- the Galra had hit almost every planet this side of the galaxy -but they were all disturbingly low level. No new mass murders of innocent civilians. No suddenly deposed kings, or local revolutions needing back up. No secret weapons of mass destruction being developed or mysterious monsters ravaging countrysides, or at least no one was sending out cries for help. It was somewhat...worrying. Allura sighed, pulled up the barely brightest beacon to investigate further. 

It was a call for help from a small science/industrial colony located on the very edge of a cluster of systems, who’d discovered a specific type of ore which the Galra were itching to get. So far, the Galra had only demanded the ore, but the colony’s leader was convinced they were seconds away from full-blown invasion. It would take three cycles, at most, to get there, spook the Galra off the planet, and leave the colonists to their studies. At least it would give them something to do. The Paladins were going, how had Hunk termed it? Stir-Crazy. As if to prove her point, Keith, Lance and Hunk came hurtling into the observatory.

“I did not!” Keith was protesting. Lance yanked what looked to be a bottle of some kind out of his hands as Hunk tried to keep them mostly apart.

“You did! I was using it yesterday and I remembered the level and it’s lower now!” He waved the bottle in Keith’s face, or would if Hunk wasn’t gently blocking it from smacking Keith’s nose, which really only ended with the back of Hunk’s hand hitting it.

“Ow! Butt out, Hunk,” Keith swatted him away.

“Oh, first you’re after my lusciously soft locks, and now you’re going for my best friend?!” Lance was only narrowly kept from launching himself at the other boy by Hunk wrapping an arm around his waist and gently lifting his toes off the ground. “Let me go you gloriously squishy lunk of man! I need to defend your honor!” 

Keith, already flushed from arguing, looked about thirty ticks from actually turning into Red and kicking Lance out the airlock. Allura put her hands up in between them, shapeshifting until she was definitely the tallest person in the room.

“Paladins!” Whatever Keith was going to say died on his tongue. “What in the name of my Kingdom demanded that you interrupt my very important business and come into MY observatory, when I’ve instructed you to let me work in peace more times that there are stars in this room?”

Hunk lowered Lance, who looked like he’d swallowed his tongue, to the blue-speckled floor. Keith shut his mouth with a quiet click. 

“Well?” Allura watched them. Lance finally held out the bottle, and winced when she snatched it from him. “Lord Argon Pennysnatcher of Qiurm’s Fast-Setting No Shower Fruity Dry Shampoo (with extra Herbs from the Distant Ends of the Galaxy), Guaranteed to Make Your Locks Lushy-Fresh, No Refunds.” She stared at each Paladin, individually. “You’re putting the galaxy in danger over a hair product? Where did you even get this?” 

“We stopped in this shopping mall thing on that planet with the oceans and those little bug tarts,” Hunk supplied helpfully. “Well, us and Coran. You and Shiro and Keith were still cleaning out the last of the Galra droids, I think.” Lance elbowed him in the ribs. “Dude!”

Allura nursed her brow with her hands. Her birthmarks tingled in the stupidity.

“It was the only chance we’ve had to go shopping in weeks!” Lance suddenly added. “You know how hard space is on my hair? I mean, Altean skin products are A-plus, they work great, but I’ve only been able to find one planet with dry-shampoo!” 

“Oh no, your hair is going to be flat while we literally save the universe, what a tragedy,” Keith muttered while pointedly not looking at Lance.

“You wanna talk hair? Do not get me started on yours, mullet-brain--”

“Paladins!” Allura cut him off, and then let them stew for a bit. She was just as tired and frustrated, and completely out of the patience needed to deal with them. The Paladins were supposed to be the finest warriors in all the galaxy, yet somehow fate had saddled her with these children. It was somewhat gratifying to watch them fall from anger, to embarrassment, to full blown shame.

“Sorry, Allura,” Hunk mumbled. 

“Get out.” They all turned to leave. “Not you two. Hunk can leave, because he’s not a complete idiot.” She hadn’t forgiven him for bringing these two Algorian pick-axes to her yet, but he was, after Shiro, her favorite of the humans. He took the opportunity to jog out of the room with a muttered “I tried,” on his way out.

“Why am I being punished?” Keith demanded after a full eighty ticks of silence. “I was just defending myself!”

“Because your Bayard is glowing, and you scared the mice!” She made that second part up, the mice were mostly dozing in the kitchen, except for the one on Pidge’s shoulder downstairs. The six of them had gotten quite close lately. She was beginning to suspect they were the only sane ones on the entire castle. Keith shifted his Bayard back into its small form and looked suitably embarrassed.

“Well? Anything to say to me?” Allura tried to make her face look like her tutor’s from when she was a child. Stern. Disappointed but also vaguely murderous. She’d gotten some practice at it over the past week of mind-dulling quiet.

“Sorry, Allura,” both Paladins mumbled, slightly out of sync. 

“Good. Go scrub down the lions, we’ll be landing in a few kilo-ticks,” she added, deciding to take that damn beacon seriously. The lions would probably appreciate the bath, anyways. Blue had taken a beating the last time they were in a real battle, and a little extra scrubbing around the ears would give her auto-repair the kick it needed. She thought for a second longer as they both tried to slink away. “Lance!” He turned, looking like a startled Rarvek. She sauntered up to him and plucked the bottle away. “I’m keeping the shampoo.” Quiznak, her hair deserved it.

\-------------------------------

The planet was small, and dense, and smelled of fermented fruit. Small, in that it was about the area of the Earth’s moon. Dense in the astronomical sense, the gravity thick and almost as cloying as the perpetual reek of whatever it was the scientists were studying. Methyl propane or something, Lance had only half listened to Allura’s curt explanation of why they were going to the rock in the first place. There were hardly any lifeforms, much less Galra. 

Not that Lance minded having no one to fight. He was quite happy with all his organs in the right places, thank you very much. Keith, on the other hand, seemed to be getting twitchy with all the peace they’d been having. Lance liked an on-edge Keith: it made him easier to rile up, and he made the most ridiculous faces when he was mad or didn’t get the joke. But lately, even Hunk was running out of things to do, recipes to try. Errands like this were the highlight of the past couple weeks.

The atmosphere of the dingy planet was breathable, if stinky, but the few hundred thousand residents were all transplants from the more heavily populated planets in this system. They were out on the very edge, almost as far from the dimming sun as Kerberos was from Earth, but the gas pooling in the atmosphere and gurgling under their feet kept the air unnaturally warm. It’d been cold enough to kill before the colonists came; they’d made an effort, but then the gas was discovered, and they’d blown enough of it, along with the methane it was derived from, into the sky to create an almost pleasant version of the greenhouse effect.

Industry had popped up quickly, selling mostly to the Galra but also to the few other economic channels the Galra had so graciously permitted to exist. They were on the very edge of the Galra empire, to the point where even though this system was technically under Zarkon’s rule, Lance couldn’t really tell. He’d seen some pretty war-torn places after months of fighting as a Paladin, and this wasn’t one.

That wasn’t to say it was nice. The only experience he’d had with a mining colony were the Balmerans, but that was different. This planet was less ‘toil and suffering’ and more... Lance knew he’d been somewhere like this before, back on Earth. The name was on the tip of his tongue. The colonists, most of whom looked sort of human, if you looked at them through a kaleidoscope or out of the corner of your eye, had come to the colony to get a job done, get paid, and eventually go home to their families. There were very few out and about, and none of them made eye contact with the team. As the Paladins walked through the cement-colored city center, Lance counted the nunvillaries they passed: three, five, eight by the time they came to the largest building on the far west side of town. It was also made entirely of something like cement, or maybe a very dull metal, set into one solid rectangular mold. There were a few windows set very high up on the face of the building, but it was otherwise unadorned. Like a factory, Lance thought. Where were they that reminded him of factories?

“This is where the beacon is coming from,” Allura said, coming to a halt in front of what was presumably a door. No one had come to meet them when they touched down, Lance wasn’t even sure they’d looked up when the five big-ass mecha Lions came out of the sky. Allura had been staring at the little tracker-crystal she’d brought from the ship the entire walk into the city. The lack of welcome party didn’t follow, she’d said. The Paladins had all watched the message from the Colony Leader on the way down, and Lance personally agreed. This place was weird, and yet, familiar. Allura mumbled something and pushed open the door.

“Alright then,” she was saying. They came into a dim square waiting room. “This should be it, we should probably announce ourselves....” A large metal disk was in the middle of the room on a large pedestal. Allura tapped gently on one of two doors that led further into the building.

“Hello?” 

Lance watched as the disk’s inner circle clicked one degree every few moments. 

“If there’s anyone there, this is Princess Allura of the Voltron Alliance!”

Clicks... kinda like ticks... mounted like a clock! Like the most memorable clock Lance had ever seen!

“This is quite strange,” Allura mused. “Hunk, could you check this Geolocator--”

“New Jersey! We’re in space New Jersey, guys!” Lance blurted.

“What?” Allura whirled on him. Shit. Pidge snorted a laugh and flailed a little for balance, hitting Keith’s shoulder. Hunk was already grabbing for the tracky-crystal thing but now he was grinning as well. 

“Yeah! I was trying to figure it out this whole time, and it totally is.” Lance’s philosophy was that Allura was pissed at him anyways, so he might as well keep talking and teach her a bit about Earth geography. “The cement? The weird industrial stuff? The smell!”

“I- What in this galaxy is a Jersey?” Confused was way better than angry, Lance thought.

“Geolocator is working fine, Princess,” Hunk handed it back to her, “We should be standing right on top of it.”

“I think old Jersey is in England? New Jersey is a place on Earth though, and we’re totally standing in the space version of it.” 

“Something isn’t quite right here,” Allura said, electing to ignore Lance. She tapped her comm. “Shiro?” He’d been left with the Lions, far preferring their company over politics. His comm crackled into their helmets.

“Everything okay, Princess?” Shiro swore up and down that he was just being polite, but Lance never bought it. Admittedly, Hunk and Coran called her ‘Princess’ as well, but they never made it sound like a petname.

“Maybe not, Shiro,” Allura paced back and forth over the spot a few times. “We’re not finding anyone, and there’s something strange about this place. Do you see anything unusual on your end?”

Keith’s hand went to his bayard, and Hunk shifted slightly in front of Pidge. Lance took his cue to get into the defensive formation they’d been working on. He glanced at the hallways leading away from them. Both were dark, but he got a sudden feeling that they weren’t exactly alone. New Jersey slunk from his mind.

“The Lions are quiet,” Shiro reported. “But I’ve been getting a similar feeling. You could be walking into an ambush there, it might be best to come back to the-” The Paladins heard a muffled crash, and then the sound of lazer fire.

“Shiro! Come in!”

Keith drew his bayard, as did Pidge a second later. Lance weighed if he could use his gun while running, and then drew his as well. Hunk stayed where he was, fists raised. They all glanced back at Allura for orders.

“Shiro!”

“I’m here, Princess,” they let out a collective breath no one knew they’d been holding as Shiro’s voice buzzed back in. “You’re right about the ambush. There’s a ship over the whole main square; I’m in Black now, but I can’t leave the rest of the Lions. You’re going to have to make a run for it-- Coran?”

“Here, Shiro, I see them!” Coran’s voice was clearer, being up in the castle ship. The castle ship that should’ve been in orbit, almost out of comms range, but was evidently close enough to make out individual Galra squads. “I started dropping altitude when I recognized her. That’s a Galra warship above your heads!”

“Lovely,” Allura mumbled. She began the complicated process of switching her diplomat’s dress for the battle armor she was wearing underneath it and coaxing her hair into a shape a helmet could hold. At the same time, she rattled off the plan to the Paladins. “We probably have- Are the canons armed, Coran?”

“Ours or theirs?”

“Theirs!”

“Looks like they’re working on it, Princess.”

“Right, then,” she turned, and Lance blushed. He was sure Hunk did too, because the Princess was really pretty, okay? Also heavily armed, not that she needed it. “We probably have about two minutes before this entire palace is rubble.” They were in a palace? Did New Jersey even have palaces? “On my mark!”

A rumble, like deep thunder if the pitch was slightly more zappy, shook them their bones. Lance steeled himself, did the little breathing thing Shiro had taught him. Battle wasn’t the time to be thinking about thirty things at once, New Jersey including. Battle needed focus, and focus needed breath. The Paladins around him had shifted, slightly, while his eyes were closed.

Allura moved in one fluid motion as she put her helmet on and slammed the door open with one kick, directly into the head of a Galra soldier. The Paladins sprung into action with her. Keith came a step behind her, already slamming his sword through a half dozen of the soldiers that seemed to converge on them from every side. He cleared enough of a path that Pidge could handle the stragglers and get the rest of them through. 

The center of the swarm, they swirled towards the closest nunvillary, its eaves hanging low and a number of chairs and tables scattered around the bunch. Lance got as close as he could to the wall, turned, and kept the soldiers from getting close enough for any precise shooting. Allura shot up to his right, moving so quickly she seemed like a pink-decaled blur. One step on a convienent table, one push off the tip of a parasol, then off the wall, and she was swinging up on the roof and turning to grab Hunk by the wrist and pull him the rest of the way. Pidge was next, scrambling off of Lance’s shoulder as he and Keith held the tide just far enough off. Above them, the screaming of the massive purple ship’s guns began to rise in pitch.

“Hunk, do you have the shot?” Allura shouted over the gunfire. The paladin in question sighted the biggest turret above him with the equally massive yellow gun he now had balanced on his shoulder. His bayard’s biggest form was a shit melee weapon, but could put a hole the size of a small elephant through the side of a Galra cruiser. The blue tinged ports on the side begin to squeal and glow.

“Fire!”

A boom knocked out Lance’s hearing for a second (he was more focused on shooting right then anyways: the bayards ran on quintessence or light or something, he didn’t have to reload, but he couldn’t just shoot in a pattern. He had to work around Keith, about ten feet forward and to his left, and keep an eye on anyone moving out of their sightline. Too much to focus on. Breathe.) and left a steaming hole in the side of the Galra cruiser. It began to tilt dangerously and swiped the top off a few grey metal buildings, smoke pouring into the musky sky.

“Fire!”

Another boom, the second major turret was down for the count. Coran popped into their comms.

“Perfect! I’m low enough for you all, if you need a lift!” The castle ship swung out of a low hanging cloud, a side door open and waiting. A roar rose up among the collected Galra, a few already running out of sight. Lance raised his arm for Hunk’s hand, which he knew would be there. Keith ran into him, and grabbed Lance in a bearhug that would let them both be lifted up onto the roof. Neither paladin made eye contact.

On the roof, things were slightly easier. The angle provided cover from the soldiers below, except for the ones climbing up the roof that Lance had to take potshots at, and made a great taking off pad. The jetpacks concealed in their battle armor popped out with a little coaxing, Keith taking care of Lance’s while the blue paladin focused on keeping Galra down there. 

“Let’s go!” 

The Paladins jumped. Time seemed to stop for Lance. He was the best pilot, but he didn’t like this part. There was a distinct difference between piloting a ship and jumping and hoping your blasters didn’t crap out. They got lucky though, this time. Allura pulled herself into the open door first, held an arm out for Pidge, who slipped in quickly and would jetpack everywhere if given a chance, and then Hunk, Keith, and finally Lance. The Paladins clung to the side of the ship, protected by the shields that zipped back around them as soon as Lance had grabbed onto the straps strung in a line over a ledge by the door for this exact purpose. He closed his eyes and breathed as they turned, took off away from the city. 

The first time they’d practiced this, Hunk had cried a little bit. Jetpacks didn’t trigger his sea (space?) sickness, he liked them almost as much as Pidge did, but tying yourself to the side of a very large ship with a very small strap of canvas? Nope.

Now though, he was able to keep his eyes open and talk strategy with Keith and Allura, and Shiro over the comms. Who’d think that Lance would be the one to shut his eyes so tight his forehead hurt and suck up as close to the ship as possible? Lance certainly hadn’t.

“You okay?” Lance didn’t open his eye, but he knew Pidge had sidled up next to him. Speaking wasn’t a great idea. He shook his head.

“We’ll be at the drop in a minute,” Pidge comforted him. “Then you and Blue can go kick Galra ass.”

“Hrmngh,” Lance tried to nod in a convincing way.

“Just keep breathing,” Pidge said, almost to herself. “We’re gonna be okay. You’ll beat Keith out of the water.”

Lance opened his death grip on the strap and inched his hand towards hers. Pidge got the hint. Grounded a little bit more than he’d been a second before, Lance breathed deeper than he had been. His mind cleared.

“Ready, Paladins!” Allura called out over the comms. The wind was too loud to hear anything spoken aloud. They had their masks closed, anyways- the air was damn thin up here.

“Drop in three- two- one- !”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HAVE A PLOT! And it's getting away from me! This fic is going to be a monster, I can already tell. Please note tag updates, and continue to do so. I can't decide whether to change the rating to M for a future chapter or just make this a series, so we're staying with a G rating for now.


	3. Revenge of Space New Jersey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why wouldn't it be a trap? Lance makes Bad Decisions.

They dropped. 

The Black Lion swooped from her hiding place down below, her mouth gaping wide. Keith landed first with a roll, then Hunk with a steady thump. Lance aimed for him and crashed, sending both boys skidding back a few feet and half into the cockpit. Pidge used her jetpacks, landing gently as the mecha closed her mouth and dove back down to their waiting Lions.

“Lance, Hunk, get ready to land,” Shiro shouted half through the comm, half over his shoulder to where the boys were disentangling themselves on the floor. Keith popped his head in the cockpit.

“How far out are we?” he asked, gingerly stepping on Lance to help Hunk up. 

“Here!” They dropped back under the cloud cover and kept going, into the secluded valley where they’d parked the Lions only a few hours before. Shiro dove like only he could.

The Paladins rushed to grab something, preferably near the door, as Black made a perfect if bumpy landing. Keith ended up squished against the back of Shiro’s chair, Lance thrown into his lap as Hunk grabbed the side of the door with one hand and Pidge with the other. 

“Everything alright back there?” Shiro asked over his shoulder as Keith mumbled something rude about Lance’s bony ass and Pidge climbed into the cockpit. 

“We’re alive,” Hunk groaned, face already green. Allura popped up on the forward screen.

“We have the main warship in our sites, but it looks like the Galra haven’t been as quiet as we thought,” she explained over the sound of Black leaning down and opening her mouth. Keith was antsy to leave, even if he hadn’t shoved Lance off of him yet, but paused to listen. “It looks as if they’ve hidden an entire battalion of Galra fighter pilots in these hills.” She flashed an image, taken from the Castle’s main viewing screen, up across Black’s windshield. Purple ships, about the size of Green, poured from the smaller ports in the warship’s hull. They weren’t very strong, the Paladins knew from what felt like hundreds of skirmishes with the things, but they were tricky in big numbers. Droid pilots didn’t care about their own safety: Every last one would have to be wiped out. “If Coran and I can get the Castle into orbit we might have a chance at destroying the cruiser, but that’s only if you can lead those fighters away from us. Shiro?”

“We understand, Allura.” The black Paladin nodded and the screen cut out. He turned to his team. “Go warm up your Lions. Lance, stick close, Keith and Pidge, don’t get cornered or surrounded, stay in front of me. Hunk, use your bulk. Think we can do this?”

Variations of ‘heck yeah!’ were called over the Paladins’ shoulders, one of which earned Pidge a light noogie from Hunk. Keith got around to shoving Lance off of his lap, but they hopped out of Black’s mouth and ran towards their lions together. Keith watched the blue Paladin out of the corner of his eye. Two months ago, Lance wouldn’t have been able or wanted to keep up. A month ago, Keith wouldn’t have let him. A hum drifted through the air, the familiar sound of approaching droid ships, and Lance sped up. 

 

\--------------------------

 

The Lions shot through the sky, steam from the muggy air peeling off their flanks like flapping cloaks of cloud. The battalion was hot on their tails, a hundred cyborg-controlled fighter ships rushing at them in a long line formation, sending screeching lazer blasts in all directions. Red wove and dived, Green mirroring her movements as they scooted ahead of the larger Lions for cover. As they came towards the end of the trickier mountain terrain and out onto a massive stretch of pale plaines, Yellow suddenly peeled off the side, banked and came around to take most of the luckier shots.

“I got this guys!” Hunk came in over the coms, “We gonna form Voltron?”

“Not in an aerial attack like this,” Shiro responded. “We need to distribute our firepower. Hunk, how long do you think you can block for us?”

“Yellow’s got at least another few minutes in her, but the more you take out, the better!” Hunk shifted in his massive mecha to smack the first of the planes out of the sky. They’d found that the Galra droids didn’t bother with things like braking. No one had bothered to program them with a self-preservation instinct, so just letting the flimsy warplanes smash into the side of Yellow could be a pretty effective, if short-term, strategy.

“Understood. Pidge, Keith: Wrap around and flank them out, stay mobile. Lance and I’ll start a barrage, keep them occupied.” The two smaller Lions shot off in different directions, Blue grabbing one of the planes that balked to chase them in her mouth.

“Shiro?” Lance started, tossing the crunched jet to the ground and going for another of the three now shooting at him like the biggest, rudest mosquitoes he’d ever met. “I don’t know how many of them I can really take. Blue’s guns are still kinda wonky after that thing on Arcus.”

“That’s fine, Lance,” Shiro said. “Just duck when I tell you to, alright? Same for you, Hunk.”

The other paladins confirmed, kept up their mostly defensive moves. Lance banked and came up to Black’s side. Hunk pulled back and ended up slightly lower than the other two. About half the original droids remained in their sights; those that hadn’t smashed into Hunk or the ground were spread out around Green and Red. They began their normal routine for taking out the smaller droids. Pidge would take a handful, shooting holes through three or four at a time with one of her homemade cannons, while Keith would take semi-random potshots at the rest, keep them on him for as long as he could. When Pidge needed to power back up, they’d spin without warning and cross in the sky, little clusters of droids following like ducklings and smashing into each other as they passed with barely a foot between them. It was long enough to disorient the surviving droids, and by the time they sorted themselves out, Pidge’s cannon was ready to go. In a few minutes, their part of the droids were whittled down to almost nothing.

Meanwhile, Black was charging. Lance shot when he could, but focused on stretching out the line of fighter pilots like taffy for Shiro’s cannon. He knew he had to concentrate harder on flying backwards than the other pilots, even Hunk, but it still made him feel useless. He watched as Red and Green twirled around each other for a split second in the sky and bit his lip, wondering if he could make a pass like that without taking Keith’s tail off. 

_Now is not the time for distraction, young Paladin,_ Blue rumbled around him. He couldn’t hear her in words, exactly, but as a comforting presence in the back of his mind that sometimes formed into meanings. He nodded. _We have our job, and our fiery friends have theirs. Watch the droid on your right. You can do this._

Lance cursed under his breath as a droid ship darted away from the others and towards Shiro. Intel had gotten far enough back into the Galra that they’d programmed their droids with it. He darted out of formation to grab it with Blue’s vicious mouth. The sound of a Galra wing crushing a few feet from him was like music to his ears. He saw a few others slip down to come for him, or avenge their fallen robot-y friend. Lance urged Blue forward and almost felt the way they crunched between her jaws, like she’d caught a mouthful of funyuns in mid air. Funyuns that squirted oil and that goopy quintessence stuff inside the droids, which evidently tasted awesome if you were a giant mecha lion.

_Yum._

“Lance, where’d you go?” Shiro suddenly yelled into his comm, slamming Lance back into his own head. He looked up and realized how far out of formation he’d flown. Black’s mouth was already hanging wide, a disturbingly bright yellow shining out of the cannon in her throat. If that wasn’t bad, two of the droids Lance had been going for were coming up behind her tail, the Lion’s one nasty blindspot. 

“You’ve got company!” Lance responded, pulling Blue around to catch them. He had to go in and out of the cannon’s range, he realized. Getting in was possible, but Blue would have to suck up to Black’s flank if she didn’t want to get them fried to a deep crisp. “Don’t fire! I’m going after them!”

“Wait, Lance-” Shiro didn’t have a choice. Black was already firing, knocking out the line of Galra planes starting on the far left. “You need to get out there. Hunk, keep the line intact!” The Galra ships were beginning to splinter away from certain defeat. Lance focused on taking the first of the two rogue ships, tried to ignore how his half of the line, his responsibility, was splintering apart. He could do this, he thought. He could grab the last rogue ship, turn, and outrun the blast of Black’s massive mouth cannon to corral the final droids back into its reach. 

_Lance, think._ Blue crackled into his mind, cautioning him. He thought about the way Red and Green had slipped by each other, their grace. He was a fighter pilot. He didn’t have time for caution.

“Shiro, don’t turn,” Lance called out through the comm. He finally grabbed the droid and sent it flying up towards the beam. It hit and smashed, disintegrating instantly. “I’m coming up your side.” He couldn’t quite fit between Black’s front legs, he knew that, but he could hug up to her neck and use it as a guide, outrun the lazer on her right just long enough to get some altitude and chase those damn ships back into line. 

_This may not be a good idea, young Paladin,_ Blue warned. _I am going over two hundred meters per tick._

“Not the time, Blue.”

_Backwards._

Lance shifted the controls, and despite her words, Blue moved without any sign of reluctance, slowing down as they changed direction and then hitting the boosters for a second to bring them up to speed. He blocked out the sounds of his team through the comms, blocked out Shiro’s warning and Pidge’s sharp curse, Hunk’s shout. Allura filtered through, but Lance didn’t listen. He breathed, and Blue moved, and they crested along Black’s head.

Lance’s eyes watered as he came in line with the cannon blast. It was raw yellow quintessence, formed in Black’s belly and shot out as a cone of impossible heat and energy, almost three times as wide as Black herself at its very edge. It blocked the torrent of shots coming from the half-corralled Galra ships from ever hitting the Black Lion, and destroyed everything in its path. Lance kept even to Black’s head for just long enough to angle himself along the cone of death, sent a prayer up to whoever was listening, and gunned it.

\--------------------

It worked for about four seconds. Blue skirted along the edge of the blast, cabin heating up and triggering about a hundred alarms. Lance began the shift upwards, along the energy beam’s curve, towards the line of rushing droid ships. One shifted, and Lance’s heart skipped a beat. They were going so fast, so damn high up, but it felt like everything slanted into slow motion.

The Galra ship shot a blast. Lance moved a little. There was bright light and a jolt. Blue tipped violently to her left and spun out. The ground started coming up way too fast and Lance scrabbled at the controls. 

“Lance, dammit!” Shiro called into the comms as the Paladins and the line of Galra shot over the spinning blue Lion. A faction of the Galra ships tilted away to chase the falling, smoking mecha. “Allura, I-” She cut him off.

“The warship’s down, we’ll be there in...twenty five ticks.”

The cannon faltered for a second, and the line of droids, however thinned out, sped up. 

“If you cut the cannon, we’ll never get them lined up again,” Keith said. Red was already banking, cutting his speed. “Pidge, we good up here?”

“Yeah, go save your boyfriend.” 

Keith let it slide and dipped out of formation. Red dove high and long over the arc of the cannon and then tilted down towards the ground. It was a complicated move, but she could handle it, especially coming from up high. Lance, trying to make it from underneath Black, didn’t stand a chance. _Dumbass._ He took lazy but precise shots at the five Galra who’d gone for easy pickings and knocked three out of the air. The last two were too close to Blue to avoid hitting her if they crashed, so he just winged them, forcing them to land.

Keith switched into a private comm line with Blue, cut out the rest of the Paladin’s burst of chatter and new plans.

“Coming in for you. Lance, what’s your location?” He didn’t really need to ask, he could see the curls of black smoke hanging in the greasy air. Space New Jersey was right, though he’d never _ever_ tell Lance that. But he needed to make sure Lance was at least conscious, and maybe get a sense of how bad Blue had taken the fall.

“I, uhm,” Lance took a second. “We’re about four, no Blue says five hundred meters from the course. I think she’s pretty hurt, I don’t-”

“I see you.” Red was low enough that Keith really could see Blue lying on her side. She didn’t look so bad from the air, but her back left flank had definitely been hit. Two Galra drones unfolded themselves from their steaming planes and began to advance on the blue Lion. Keith barely waited for Red’s feet to touch the ground before he was diving out her mouth. 

“Stay in your Lion, Lance.” Keith drew his bayard and ran at one of the droids. The other began shooting. “Shit.”

“What? What’s going on?” There was a crash, and Lance was scrambling out of Blue like his ass was on fire, which it sort of was.

 

About fifteen minutes later, Keith was sitting cross legged on the ground, resting against the exoskeleton of a droid with an almost perfect hole through its middle. The top half of his armor was laying in a pile, upon which he was resting his arm. Lance was sitting in front of him and angrily rubbing the anti-bac onto a blistering lazer wound that ran along the other boy’s forearm.

“And another thing!” Lance had finally caught his breath and was launching into the second half of his customary lecture. “You should have waited for me! Just because you’re good in the air doesn’t mean you can handle a bunch of droids on your own.”

“Two is not a bunch, Lance.”

“It’s reckless!” He tossed the anti-bac in the general direction of the first aid kit and unwrapped a roll of space bandage, which still looked like plastic wrap.

“Says the guy who just divebombed the ground.”

Lance had a really good comeback for that on the tip of his tongue, but the other Paladins were coming in above them and starting to land. Keith reached over their arms and grabbed his helmet, tapped some buttons. Lance wrinkled his nose. He could never get stupid Altean tech to cooperate.

“We’re by Red,” Keith said, cutting through the rest of the team’s landing chatter, now being broadcast through the helmet’s external speakers. 

“Keith? Oh thank fuck,” Pidge responded, cutting through the others. “Is Lance with you?”

“We’re both okay,” Lance said. “Even though Keith was doing his hardest not to be!”

“We’re really gonna start that again?”

“Guys!” Shiro was out of Black, and jogging towards them. Keith moved to stand, but Lance yanked him back down to finish the band aid. “Now isn’t the time. How’s Blue?”

Blue had pulled herself upright, finally, and now sat half curled around Red. She looked like she was licking her flank, though mechanically and without a tongue.

“She says she’ll be okay,” Lance answered. His voice was disconcertingly quiet, which Keith wasn’t sure what to do with. “She’s been using her auto-maintenance, but she needs to get back to the Castle to finish.”

Pidge and Hunk made it to their little huddle. Pidge watched the two boys for a second, checking them over, and then turned to Blue. Hunk sat by Lance, ruffled his hair, and followed. The smaller girl shrugged her bag off and said something indecipherable to Hunk before pulling herself into the cabin. The mechanics got to work.

“Well, that’s going to be a problem.” Shiro’s arms were crossed, which was never a good sign. Lance finished the bandage and looked up, frowning. Shiro’s voice was tight, controlled. “Allura brought the Castle down to help us out, turned her back on that warship too soon. They managed to get away, but not before the Galra got a serious hit through their shields.”

“Are they okay?” Lance blurted.

“They’ll be fine, but the Castle is in a bad way. They landed about eight kilometers west of here, so once Blue can fly, we’re headed over there. Hunk, Pidge and I sent the Galra packing, but between Blue and the Castle....” Shiro trailed off, perhaps seeing the red-tinged shame that was beginning to heat up Lance’s ears. “Better get used to space New Jersey, guys. We’re going to be here a while.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter should be up in a week or three, who knows. Follow me at kieth-the-rad.tumblr.com for actual Klance instead of whatever this mess is.


	4. Martyr-Complex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stuck on Space New Jersey, Lance could think of worse fates. Not at the moment, of course, but he _could_.

Lance was having the worst week of his entire life, and he’d thought he was going to become a freakin’ cargo pilot for like a month before Keith dropped out, so that was saying something. The “short” version was this: He’d made a colossal mistake and the Castle was stuck on a backwater industrial colony for at least a few weeks, or however long it’d take Shiro and Allura to track down a Very Specific Ancient Altean Technology which Coran and Hunk had both tried and given up explaining to him, but was needed to fix his colossal mistake. In the meantime, Coran, Pidge, and Hunk were fixing what they could on primarily Blue and the Castle, but also the other Lions (except for Black, who was with the Away team. Lance’s life was getting way too Star Trek these days). The Castle had been running on auxiliary since they landed; The crystals were working fine, they had power, but something in the flow of quintessence from the crystals through the Castle had been damaged by the Galra. Lance didn’t understand it, and didn’t really care about the details beyond the checklist in his head of what was and wasn’t working. 

That left Lance with nothing but grunt work to do. Whenever he complained to Pidge, he was given whatever task she didn’t want to do, which was usually so simple it felt vaguely insulting. Hunk would try to entertain him for a few minutes, but then fell back on Pidge’s technique, though he was nicer about it. Lance avoided Coran outright. Whenever he ran into the man, he was told to go fill in the gaps where they’d shut off a system or three to lessen the tax on what was left of the power grid. For Lance, that evidently meant running stinky sani-solution over every freakin’ surface in the ridiculously huge building/ship.

“Think of it as a spot of Spring Cleaning!” Coran had told him, after Lance outright refused to wipe down the Central Command Board for a fifth time. “Or in our case, Decamillenial Cleaning!”

“Doesn’t the Castle have, like, an auto maintenance thing?” Lance whined. “Like the Lions?”

“Well, the Castle’s systems can’t be expected to take care of everything. And it’s part of your training! Why, the Paladin two goes before you used to start each morning with a brisk mop-down of the entire front deck!”

But none of that was the worst part. No, the worst part of Lance’s own private week from hell was that he had to share his duties with _Keith_.  
Keith, who evidently thought cleaning was beneath him. Keith, who would just up and vanish as soon as Coran even thought about the word “sanitizer”. Keith, who Pidge and Hunk (traitors!) kept giving the slightly-less-menial jobs to.

“Fucking Keith...” Lance grumbled as he leaned against Blue’s huge front paws. She’d been half disassembled by Hunk, so he could begin the long process of getting her armor back into working condition. Lance had decided that the front half needed some TLC too, so he was in her hanger under the pretense of getting the space dust out of all the nooks and crannies in what armor she still had

She’d stayed mostly operational since they limped back to the Castle, which Lance was glad for. Blue was comforting, or as comforting as a giant metal robot could be. And, well, this was all his fault. Them being stranded, Blue being grounded, the massive chunk missing out of the side of the Castle. Not even kind of his fault, it just was. The others wouldn’t say anything, of course, but Lance kept getting those weird glances from them that said more than their mouths ever would. He’d been arrogant, and they were all paying for it, and the worst part was that they weren’t even disappointed. 

Lance had lived right up to their expectations, because they were really just that low.

Blue had picked up on this, and that was part of the reason why she was keeping herself operational, at least when Lance was awake. He needed some sort of presence that didn’t feel judgemental, and Blue was literally incapable of disappointment. She was a quiet, passive feeling in the back of his head, as long as she was operational. And she didn’t give him ten thousand things to clean in what Lance didn’t want to realize was a well meaning attempt to give him something beyond his own abject failure to think about. Blue cared about her pilot, and even a piece of metal and quintessence could see he needed her, needed someone to listen.

She’d also been listening to Lance complain about Keith for three days straight, so at the moment, she was in sleep mode. But Lance didn’t need to know about that. 

“He’s just so annoying. I mean... Ugh. Fucking Keith!”

“Knew you would eventually,” Pidge said, not looking up from her laptop as she walked into the hangar. She went around to a long cord hanging down from Blue’s windshield and plugged in, as Lance’s mouth flopped open like a dying fish until his brain came back online.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it!”

“Is it really, though?” She let the somewhat familiar line of conversation drop, and switched to a very familiar one. “Those are pretty harsh words for you. What’d he do this time?”

“Just, fucking...”

Lance had been tasked with cleaning the training mats two days ago, and had been avoiding it until this morning when Coran threatened to take his Blue slippers hostage. When he got to the training deck, mop and bucket in hand, he was greeted with a floor covered in what could only be the result of a horrific mud/meat processing plant explosion. He didn’t know if the brownish handprint on the door was dirt or dried blood, and he didn’t want to. When he’d barged into Keith’s room a few gag-inducing hours later, the only excuse the red paladin had was that he’d been training outside, until the sickly sweet ethanol-compound rain had started, and then he’d moved to the training deck.

“That doesn't explain the blood!”

“There isn't any, that weird rain just turns brown when you sweat in it.”

Sweat was better than blood, but Lance still spent an hour under the showerhead scrubbing it out from his nails. Keith hadn't lifted even a finger to help him! Sure, he was spending all his work time with Hunk and the Castle’s auxiliary power system, but that wasn't an excuse. Especially when he vanished for all six of his free time hours every evening, and then some. Lance would figure out what was up with that if it killed him.

“Oh yeah,” Pidge blurted, as if something was just occurring to her. “Hunk sent me in here to tell you that I’m bleeding.”

“You’re what?!” Lance flailed and Pidge held out one hand, not looking up from her laptop. A gash ran through the webbing between her thumb and first finger. He hopped up through Blue’s mouth and came back with a handful of anti-bac and bandaids. 

“It’s not that bad,” Pidge said. “I've been sucking on it, it doesn't even sting anymore.”

“Well, if you want to get tetanus, be my guest.” It figured. Band-aids and anti-bac were all Lance was good for these days, and with all his recent failures, it was no wonder the team didn't even want that. 

“So... you gonna put that blue stuff on, or what?” Pidge asked, after they'd been sitting in silence for a few seconds. Lance stared at her blankly.

“Oh. Yeah, sure.” He tore the anti-bac open, realized he didn’t have anything to rub it on with, and settled for squirting it on the cut. Pidge hissed and pulled away.  
“Fuck that stings! How can Keith handle this shit every goddamn fucking day?” 

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” Lance said, though he didn’t really know. He didn’t get cut often enough to use the first aid kit, and when he did, he just treated it the way Pidge did: hand in your mouth, till it mostly stopped bleeding. Keith never complained this much though, even if he tried to glare a hole through Lance’s face every single time. Lance pulled apart a piece of the clear space band-aid and stuck it on the unfortunately placed wound. At least when Keith got hurt, he was easy to patch. Wait. When he thought about Keith, Pidge’s actual words sunk in, and Lance frowned.

“What do you mean, every day? Keith hasn’t gotten hurt since we landed.”

“He has though?” Pidge half asked, half told. “He comes in bandaged all to hell in the mornings. Hunk told me about it. They’ve been showering at the same time so they could go over the circuit spreads before breakfast.”

“What? No. Blue, has Keith been using your first aid kit?” The mecha behind them said nothing.

“Dude, she’s idling.” Pidge turned her laptop around to show a screen with lots of confusing boxes and words that Lance didn’t recognize, but a very straight green line he did. It showed Blue in sleep mode for all three hours back it went.

“Come on, Blue!” There was a rumble, then a start.

 _Young paladin. Yes._ If mechanical cats could sound sleepy over telepathy, Blue did so. _What was your question?_

Lance didn’t care enough. So what if his life was so terrible, his own freakin’ Lion couldn’t stay awake for it? He was failing at everything, might as well fail at robot entertainment. There were more important matters at hand, like where was Keith getting hurt and why the hell had no one thought to tell Lance when that was literally his only job around here?

 _Taking care of the Red Paladin is hardly your only function in Voltron, Lance._ Blue chided gently. _But I too am troubled over this news. Red’s pilot must be seeking medical attention outside of the Castle._

“Did Hunk say anything else?” Pidge had been watching Lance talk to Blue with an almost impressed look across her face. She shrugged when he asked.

“Nope, not really.” Something wolfy crossed her features. “Why do you care so much?”

“I don’t!” Lance backpedaled. “I’m just supposed to be the medic, that’s all. Coran said so and everything.”

“I thought you hate being the medic.”

“I never said that!”

“You bitch about it enough, we all assumed.”

She had a point. Whenever someone (Keith) got hurt, Lance would whine, complain, and generally grouse about the hassle of getting the kit, and he didn’t even know how to do any of this, and jeez Keith, you scrape your knees more often than my baby sis, which Pidge had snickered at until Lance had thrown a bottle of space-acetaminophen at her. 

“I don’t know, I got used to it.” If he was being honest with himself, Lance kind of liked playing doctor. Underneath his thick layer of cocky posturing and terrible puns, Lance was deeply aware of exactly how much less skilled he was than the rest of the team. He wasn’t a leader or a planner like Shiro and Allura. He couldn’t fix things like Pidge or make things like Hunk. And he couldn’t even fly right: that was Keith’s thing, and no matter how much Lance hated it, his most recent fuck up only seemed to prove it. 

Putting weird alien neosporin and cling-wrap band-aids on his teammates was the one thing Lance _could_ do, so quiznak, he was going to do it right. He actually put work into remembering the ten thousand little things Blue told him, and filling in her gappy knowledge of human biology with his own experience as an older (and younger) sibling along with an 80’s-era textbook he’d found shoved into the back of a closet. Pidge’s little cut wasn’t all that bad, she could’ve probably taken care of it herself, but he liked that she’d come to him, even if Hunk had to push her. 

Which made the fact that Keith was getting hurt and not coming to him all the more.... What? Lance couldn’t decide what the weird gurgling in the pit of his stomach, rising up to just behind his heart, really meant. Annoyed? Almost, but with a hint of disgust and, ew. Betrayal. Jealous. Maybe. Either way, this needed to stop. Lance needed to figure out what Keith was up to, where he was getting his extra-Voltron medical attention, and most importantly, put a stop to it before someone (Keith) got hurt even worse. Or, at the very least, he could watch Keith get his ass kicked by whoever was kicking his ass, and that’d make this hellweek worth it. 

“Did you fart or something?” Pidge suddenly broke him out of his mini-angst. “Your face looks weirder than normal.” Lance took a deep breath, shoved whatever butterflies were rotting in his stomach back into their proper positions, and made up his mind.

“Nope, even better!” he could do this. “We’ve got to figure out where Keith’s getting hurt. If he’s going into town, he’s slacking off from his Castle duties, and I have cleaned way too much mud off the training mats this week to allow that!”

“Allow? You couldn’t get Keith to clean if you begged.” 

“A) Rude, Pidge, come on,” Lance cleared his throat. “And two, that’s only half the point. If he’s getting his ass kicked outside of training, Shiro is gonna want to know. Allura is going to want to know!” A lovely mental image of Allura chewing Keith out and making him wash all the cryo-pods _by himself_ swept across Lance’s mind, and was really too sweet to bear. Shiro would be in the background, he decided, thanking Lance for being the ‘best medic and teammate he’d ever met, _ever._ ’ 

“...yeah, sure, tell me how that goes,” Pidge said, after indulging whatever weird fantasy she watched play across Lance’s face for a few seconds. Her systems test finally ended, so she unplugged her laptop from Blue’s head and turned to leave. Something occurred to her.

“When he isn’t doing whatever it is, Keith’s been helping Hunk a lot down in the central core.”

“I know! What is up with that?” Lance started moving to follow her, which, please no. “Like, what can Keith do that I can’t?” Learn an alien programming language, for starters, Pidge thought but didn’t say. Lance had gotten his normally enormous ego bruised enough recently, and it was a little sad. No one could say she hadn’t done anything for him.

“Probably just lifting things, you know, holding panels.” It was generally what she asked Lance to do when he inevitably got bored and wandered to the main hangar. “But he and Hunk are hanging out a lot, if you get what I mean.” She watched the gears turn in Lance’s eyes and-

“I- No, Pidge, he’d never!” And come to a completely wrong conclusion, apparently. “Hunk is the nicest person on every planet, especially this one. Even if Keith asked him to train extra!” For someone who spoke in like, eighty-five percent puns and innuendo, Lance was really not getting the hint. 

“Obviously,” she tried to speak slowly, so it’d sink in. “But maybe, you know, he might’ve told Hunk something? About what he’s doing when he’s leaving the Castle?”  
“Oh.” Lance blinked. “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”

 

\------------------

 

Hunk was a lot less helpful than he’d hoped, Lance thought as he paced the hallway outside of Red’s hangar. When he’d finally managed to allude to the question strongly enough, during one of their daily “wash dishes and dish gossip” sessions, Hunk had just shrugged.

“I don’t know man, you know how he is.” Hunk gently set down the plate he’d been drying in the ever-growing stack and grabbed the one Lance was handing him from under the warm, soapy water. The ship’s kitchen did have a dishwasher-like machine (attached to the fridge and the oven) but Hunk had agreed to sacrifice it to conserve power. Lance didn’t mind, it was probably the only time he managed to get Hunk away from the core.

“Keith came down to report the outputs from one of the cores with a black eye once and said he got it training, but when I told him Allura got me to set a top-limit for the training bot, he ignored me. Since then, it’s nothing that visible, just like band-aids, you know?” Hunk thought for a second as he picked up the heavy stack of plates, leaving the towel for Lance to throw silverware on. “He really wasn’t getting them from you?”

“No! He’s not avoiding me, but he hasn’t asked me for the med kit since we landed.”

“And he’s not getting the bruises from you either,” Hunk punctuated his sentence with the heavy thunk of the team’s plates. “Right?”

“Who do you think I am, Hunk? Keith?” Hunk gave him a Look.

“Just sayin’. You guys get pretty cutthroat whenever we have downtime like this.”

“Have a little faith,” Lance grinned. He and Keith _had_ had some impressive scuffles in the past. Usually they ended with Allura yelling at them or Shiro being disappointed (which was marginally worse), but black eyes weren’t exactly impossible. Not for months, though, and he told Hunk that.

“You can get bruised in more than one way, Lance,” Hunk hummed. “He does seem to have a couple on his neck.” Lance blushed, flustered.

“Where is that even coming from?” he demanded. “Keith is my sworn enemy! My arch nemesis! I would never-”

“Teasing, teasing,” Hunk clapped a hand over Lance’s shoulder. “He’s been using less time in the gym though, I can say that. Especially after I messed with the bot. He’s probably just found somewhere to train in town, it’s only like a ten minute walk.” Lance frowned. He’d never felt an urge to go visit, especially after the ambush, and he hadn’t realized they were so close. “Maybe he’s meeting someone.”

“And what, asking them to beat him up?” Lance scoffed. Hunk shrugged, leaving it open ended.

“As I said, more than one way to get a bruise.”

It hadn’t gotten any more helpful from there. Now, Lance had no choice but to hide outside of Red’s hangar and wait for Keith to... do. Something? Lance hadn’t really planned this for. He was pretty good at thinking on the fly, though, so he was sure he’d come up with one as soon as Keith came out of whatever he was doing in the hangar.

Which wouldn’t be for another three minutes, Lance thought as he tapped the screen of his helmet, waking it up. He’d come prepared: Scanning the surveillance cams to figure out what time Keith left the castle every day (about an hour after the lights dimmed), wearing his armor and remembering to put it into stealth-colors, walking down the hall ten times that morning to find the perfect hiding spot. Lance was ready. As soon as Keith came out of the hangar, he’d go all stealth-mode on his ass, follow him into town, and burst out at an opportune moment. He hadn’t decided when, yet, but that’d depend on what it was Keith was doing down there, right?

The door slid open and Keith came striding out, eyes fixed on the thin datapad in his hand. Pidge had fixed up all their phones to be compatible with Altean tech, but Keith had only had an ancient slide phone when they’d blasted off into space, so Allura had helped him buy a sleek but sturdy datapad at the first tech-mall they'd found. Keith used it sparingly, and Lance was surprised to see it.

He hugged the wall as Keith passed, bypassed the airlock, and stepped out into the dull daylight. Lance realized that the airlock was about to be a problem. If he let it close and had to reopen, Keith would notice and he’d be done. Lance zipped forward as soon as Keith was a breath away from the door and desperately tried not to trip over his own feet as he jumped through the about-to-close double doors. He just barely managed to grab the side of the threshold and pull himself out of view as Keith glanced suspiciously over his shoulder. 

The walk down to the city was a rough one, as far as Lance was concerned. They’d towed the Castle and Blue back down into one of the many hidden valleys surrounding the city, but the hilly country was just as treeless as the plains. There were a couple rocky outcroppings here and there, which Lance tried to hug up to, but it seemed like Keith was purposefully picking out a trail that left him exposed. Or, Lance thought, a trail that no one could follow without revealing themselves. Keith was paranoid like that. Fucking Keith.

What Lance just called the city, but probably did have a proper name he’d forgotten, started abruptly and unnaturally a few gray yards from the last major rocky outcropping. It was a jarring transition, with the edges of the flat concrete buildings standing in a sharp line against empty chemical desert. By the time they’d come down from the hills, the sun had dipped low enough in the murky air to, though it never got pitch black here, definitely count as ‘night’. Lance hung back in the hollow of a thin cave until Keith turned just beyond the buildings, and then tried to catch up, sidling along the scratchy wall.

The red Paladin was making his way along a half dead side street, one of the first that ran parallel to the town’s border buildings. A few of the colony’s strange inhabitants milled about, mostly in doorways or the openings of perpendicular alleyways. They were almost human looking, but with almost blue gray skin and ridged noses that ran up to their hairline. Most were thickset, stocky, but a rare few were so skinny they seemed to teeter above the rest, like taffy stretched too thin. Lance pulled a few strong stares, especially as he darted from concealed alley to building edge. He suddenly regretted having not brought his coat; The planet was hot, and he’d hoped that the stealth-moded armor would be enough, but it seemed to just make him even more conspicuous. The coat would’ve been hot and out of fashion for the locals but the hood would make a huge difference.

Somehow, Keith drew almost no notice from the quiet colonists. He wore the under-clothes from his armor with his red coat and carried his helmet under one arm. Maybe Hunk was right, Lance thought. If he trained here a lot, he had to be comfortable with the locals.

They turned onto one of the city’s central streets, about three up from the one they’d walked as a team, searching for their eventual trap. At the time, in the middle of a dimly lit day, Lance had thought it creepily silent. A week and a suncycle later, he could barely recognize the city filled as it was with people. People! Not in crowds, or even particularly dense clusters but... Lance thought he could see families, miniature versions of the older colonists being directed by sets of what could only be parents, through the large groups that gathered in and around fenced in seating areas. He couldn’t quite see into any of the storefronts, but from the numbers and the noise- the quiet of the cliffs and outer town was _nothing_ compared to the city proper -they were nunvillaries, or whatever the local drinking establishment was.

He almost lost Keith, wondering at the change in the city. The remnants of the creepy space New Jersey they’d been ambushed in were definitely there, in the nasty uniformity of the buildings and generally industrial smell to the air, but it’d been augmented by the sight of bright LEDs sending colored patterns across the pale concrete and the sweet scent of booze and some kind of cooking. When Lance had looked back for the telltale smudge of red, he took a second to pick it out of a swirl of orange and purple, just in time to watch it turn into the LED-covered doorway.

Maybe gyms just looked different on this side of the galaxy, Lance told himself as his struggled through the throng of benches outside the building. Maybe Keith was training in some backroom thing, like bizarro space fight club. Or...Hunk’s suggestion creeped dangerously close to Lance’s stream of thought, and was resisting all attempts to shove it back down. 

The scene Lance was met with when he finally pushed into the space didn’t help at all. The wall to his left was lined with a shiny mirror coating on top of something strong enough to hold up shelves and shelves of murky, curling bottles entwined with thinner stripes of the bright little fairy lights. Perfectly square blocks, made out of the same not-wood as the benches outside, were scattered around the room as ‘tables’, and groups of three or four colonists meandered around most of them. Four dark, circular booths lined the right wall, their boundaries reaching up into the low ceiling. Music pulsed through Lance, loud enough to feel in his bones but nonspecific, easily ignored by the patrons. A long black block portioned off a bar area across the room, and three of the thin, fae-like colonists drifted behind it.

Keith was sitting in a cushy looking stool and talking to one of them as they dried a thin, tubular glass. A similar one sat in front of him and he played with the straw, sipping between chatting with the lithe, grey-blue bartender. Worst of all, the red Paladin was _smiling_ , a half grin like the one he’d shown at the party that first week on Arus, or when Shiro praised him and ruffled his hair. It made his whole face glow, better than the twirling lightshow across his cheeks. Whatever he was drinking had to be affecting him, Lance decided. His eyes were too wide, his movements too gentle. 

At least, gentle whenever he spoke with the softly smiling bartender.

Lance didn’t realize he was still standing in the doorway until a burly colonist shoved him aside with a grunt. He stumbled and flailed, trying to catch his balance but still falling face-first into what felt like a concrete telephone pole. Strong hands grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him gently back as Lance managed to flail verbally.

“Sorry, sorry” The room had gotten a few degrees quieter and Lance began to turn, looking for a splash of red in a maroon-tinged room. Suddenly, the ground fell away from his feet. “Fudge-shit-I, oh my god,” Lance lost all control of his tongue as the frankly ridiculously tall alien picked him up and placed him in the shelter of a booth he hadn’t even noticed. “What?”

“Shush,” the annoying giant beanpole he’d smashed his face into pointed, and Lance craned his head out to see-

“What.”

Keith had his back to the room, long fingers tracing up and down the glass. The massive alien who’d sent Lance careening off into his new...friend... was about a foot behind the other boy, saying something Lance couldn’t quite hear but was accented by two equally burly colonists flexing behind them. Keith looked almost like he was ignoring the scene that had the rest of the room riveted, on edge, until-

The glass shattered, Keith was turning, his fist was flying as fast as Lance had ever seen it go, and the alien was dropped to the floor with a boom that Lance could feel in his shoes, with glass shards embedded all over their face. The bar’s patrons were streaming out the door, getting as far away from the mounting fight as they could. Not so back alley then, Lance thought as he watched Keith jump a kick aimed across his shins and use the moment to bring the fleshy side of his palm down across the second alien’s blocky face. The colonists weren’t human, but their noses broke as well as a human’s, and blue blood tinged sickly black by the red of the barlights streamed down their face. The third alien crossed their stocky arm over Keith’s neck and yanked, trying to break his collarbone or at least pull him off balance, but Keith had a heel in his foot before Lance could blink and then a solid hit across the third attacker’s ribs. The colonist stumbled backwards but grabbed Keith’s wrists as they tottered, not hard enough to pull him down but keeping him occupied.

From the floor, the second alien had recovered enough to pull themselves to their feet, swiping stubby fingers across their upper lip and giving out a low growl when they tasted the blood. Keith, focused on twisting his hands from the third alien’s rocky grasp, didn’t turn as the second one hurtled towards him with one fist raised back to strike.

“Keith!” Lance couldn’t keep watching, he had to at least _warn_ Keith before he was an invisible smudge across the floor. A hand landed on his arm and yanked him backwards, keeping him locked in the hidden booth.

“Stay,” the stupid elf-vulcan bastard ordered him. Lance began to argue, but the words failed in his mouth as he watched Keith take the hit but duck, yank his hands towards himself, and crack the heads of the two assailants against each other with a sharp crunch, like a wrecking ball hitting a pineapple. He was staring, wide mouth hanging open like a poorly rendered cartoon before Keith lazily turned to look up at him. A huge purplish bruise was rising on the side of his head, drew a stripe down his neck and vanished under the collar of his v-neck, not to mention his own share of glass shards dripping blood from his hands to the floor. 

“Dumbass!” Lance yelled. He shrugged off (was released by) his newfound babysitter and walked across the bar. Patrons streamed around him, towards the door, but left plenty of room for the shouting foreigner to get upstream. “This place is filled with rock people,” he began to chide as he pushed Keith down to sit back on the stool, dusted off the glass from the bar, and whipped out his handy portable first aid kit from the one pocket of his under-armor. “You should’ve just let them handle it.”

“Are you stupid?” Keith asked after a few seconds of staring at him as the blue Paladin began gingerly pulling out the glass from his palms. Lance would have to get some running water over them to get the really small pieces, but the chunks were his more pressing concern. “I’m not just... Fucking christ, Lance, I didn’t think you’d follow me in here. Shiro maybe, but you’re not him.” He didn’t even try to bat Lance’s hand away.

“Oh, just because I’m not the stupid ‘team leader’,” Lance flailed with the tweezers in something like air quotes, “Means that I can’t check up on my fr-my teammates when they keep getting hurt?”

“Yeah, actually. This place is dangerous as shit.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have gone here!”

“And maybe you should’ve turned back when I led you to a dark fucking space bar instead of hurtling in like an idiot!” Keith ripped his hand away and smacked it on the table for emphasis, grimacing a second later. His face was flushed, and he winced. “Ouch, fuck.” Lance barely noticed himself carefully taking Keith’s hand back and spraying on a layer of anti-bac/painkiller, more focused on figuring out what the red Paladin had just said.

“You knew I was following you?” A little part of him felt betrayed.

“Lance, you tripped on the airlock,” Keith worked out through the harsh set of his jaw. Lance lightened up on the (temporary, they really needed some running water) bandaging and moved on to the bruise across his face. “And a rock.”

“Nuh-uh! The airlock was a fluke and I never even touched a single stone, thank you very much. Frankly, I’m insulted by these,” Lance finished up the bruise cream application and poked it, “Wild accusations.”

“You said, “fucking rock how dare” and then kicked it, Lance,” Keith said as he batted Lance’s hand away. There wasn’t any venom to the action. If Lance didn’t know better, he’d say Keith was even being playful, now that his face didn’t hurt. 

“Not the point.”

Lance tucked away his first aid kit, Keith mostly patched up. The bar had lost the vast majority of its patrons, including the three assailants, who had dragged each other out at some point. Lance wondered who they were, adding it to his growing list of ‘what the fuckity, Keith’. Now, the eerily tall colonist from the booth had joined two of the three bartenders behind the bar, including Keith’s friend from before the fight. The third was vacuuming up the glass and possibly the blood, with a silent, see through tube. The ones behind the bar stared at him, eyes large and flat. They didn’t seem to blink. Lance swallowed what little moisture remained in his mouth. Stock still like a grove of trees in an unnaturally still forest, they were really fucking creepy. 

“You guys are like, really freakin’ creepy,” Lance’s mouth said without consulting him first. “Like, the rock dudes are one thing but, _dude_.”  
He received a blank stare in return. The moment stretched. 

“We much appreciate your efforts,” the colonist said, turning towards Keith. “Though your...” they paused, letting the empty air sink in, “...Friend raises a valid concern. Such bodily harm is not worth only a moment’s reprise.”

“It’s no trouble, really,” Keith said. “You need the help, and I’m stuck out here anyways.”

“Still. At least accept more than our gratitude-” 

“We’ve already talked about this,” Keith waved them off. “You shouldn’t have to pay anybody for protection, not me, and not those fake cops. I already cost you a glass.”

The tallest colonist tilted their head in a slight nod. 

“May we refresh your drink, at least?” The glimmer of a smile passed over their lips as their eyes brushed Lance. “And find something suitable for your companion, of course.”

“Uhm, well,”

“We’d love one!” Lance burst through. Charity was great and all, but evidently Keith wasn’t reading the major ‘don’t make us owe you’ vibes coming off these guys. “Anything that isn’t nunvill.” The tall colonist nodded, and some unspoken communication seemed to pass between them and the three bartenders. They and one of the bartenders walked briskly from the bar through a half hidden doorway and the other two workers spread out down the long bar. The one who’d been chatting with Keith earlier sprung into action, remixing a curly-straw thin glass drink and pulling out a second, odd glass.

“Keith said the same thing the first time he came,” they said, sending a conspiratorial look over to Lance. This blue bartender was a bit shorter than the others, and the only one of the elfin colonists Lance had seen display more than the faintest emotion so far. “Have you ever tried a Stardrifter?”

“We’re all lightweights Kaneh, remember?” Keith slurped from what appeared to be a metallic-green slushy. Someone had put the lights up when the fight broke out; without the ten thousand swirling fairy lights in multi colored darkness, the room looked just, well, just like a bar with all the lights on. It was all sort of disappointing, Lance thought. Early enough in the evening though, in a town like this, for them to put the lights down and open back up for a few hours. Keith had said something else to the bartender- Kaneh, his half paying attention brain supplied- who was grinning almost to match the red Paladin. Even with a bruise covering half his face and blood underneath his fingernails, Keith grinning was a sight to behold. But Lance shoved it out of his head. He still had adrenaline in his system, evidently. And Keith wasn’t even grinning at him!

“Ah, hoo-mans,” Kaneh laughed. “Can’t hold your Achelian Draught worth a damn! But tell me how you like this.” They pushed the shorter, rotund glass over to Lance. The straw was straight, and looked flimsier. The liquid inside was definitely not a color found in nature, at least not any nature Lance was familiar with, and that was quickly becoming a cross-galaxy familiarity. He took a ginger sip. 

As soon as the drink hit his tongue, smashes of color, _moving_ color, burst behind his eyes. He couldn’t taste much more than something sour, maybe, and the straw itself was sweet but- Oranges and pinks and greens and teensy moments of blue seemed to overlay the rest of the world. He could barely even hear anything, over the colors in his head. Lance gripped the edge of the table so hard he knew his knuckles paled. 

“Swallow,” Keith’s voice coaxed through his hallucination. Lance obeyed, not able to do much else. The intensity faded almost instantly, and a second later, he only saw gently swaying ghosts in his eyes, like he’d been staring at a merry-go-round for too long. His mouth tasted a little sour, a little sweet.

“Uhm.” Lance swallowed again. No wonder Keith had been grinning. How on earth (or at least on Space New Jersey) could Keith fight while under the influence of- of whatever that was. 

“Thoughts?” Kaneh cocked his head.

“That’s... that’s really trippy.” Lance looked back at the drink. “Holy mother.”

“It’s even more intense as a Parush’kan,” Keith said. “I was talking to Miroosh, one of the other bartenders, a few days ago and evidently-”

He never got the chance to finish his sentence. The back door was opened faster than Lance could track with a light ‘woosh’, and the treelike fae-colonist strode back into the room. Their eyes were harsh, all business.

“Karokan has rallied his police-force,” they said, reaching for the laid aside first aid kit and pressing it into Lance’s hands. “They will be here shortly; We sent Miroosh to scout and they are already hot on her trail.”

“Understood,” Keith slapped his non-glass filled hand on Lance’s shoulder and shoved him off the stool. Lance felt like he had a thousand more things to ask the colonist; What he’d just drank, how long Keith had been coming there, what the fuck was up with their eyes, but Keith was sort of dragging him along. He settled on a quick wave bye, which was answered by Kaneh’s sweet, slightly flirtatious smile. 

The cold night air was a shock, seeing as it had been muggy on the planet for as long as Lance had been there. More pressing, though, was the sharp bellow coming from their right, of at least six, maybe eight bulky, hulking colonists. One had a nose that had been hastily set. He appeared to be holding a double headed hammer, that happened to have roughly the same dimensions as Pidge. 

“Shit,” Keith mumbled. Lance was inclined to agree. They turned to run in the smart direction, away from the angry colonists, only to be met with a low, rumbling growl. A second, bulky hulky group of colonists stepped out from the other side of the building. There were only three of them, but the growling was coming from a dimly lit cross between a small rhinoceros and a very large turtle. Lance followed a shiny line of thick chain from the beast’s neck to the hand of a colonist whose face looked like it’d been hastily bandaged, say, to stop the bleeding that being punched with a fistful of glass would cause. “Double shit,” Keith mumbled.

“Which way do we go?” Lance said aloud. “Fuck, Keith, which way do we go?”

“Uhm.” Lance could almost hear the eenie-meenie-minie-mo in Keith’s head. “Three is better odds than seven.”

“Right.”

 

\------------------------------------

 

The city had a lot more sharp gray corners than Lance remembered as Keith led him in a half sprint, half totally not-suspicious run around most of them. Not that he was actually remembering it, in the moment. The wind biting into his face, the burn in his thighs, the ache in his ankles; Everything was in the escape, even though he wasn’t sure anyone was chasing them. He didn’t have time to think about how Keith’s hand slipping from his shoulder when they sped up, to grasp his upper arm, then his wrist, finally slipping to grip his hand. Keith’s fingers were warm, grounding him as they wound their way breakneck through the unfamiliar alleys, streets. His pumping legs felt like they’d been stretched to the very limits of their endurance, but. A grin swept over Lance’s face without him fully realizing it.

They burst across the perfect line in the sand between pale city and pale desert and Keith sped up, causing Lance to see stars. When they finally came to the first of the jutting, rocky outcroppings as the valleys rose up out of nowhere, Lance yanked Keith behind a conveniently hidden one.

Keith was breathing hard too, Lance saw as he rested his head back on the hard sandstone with a clunk. The red Paladin peeked out behind them and nodded, satisfied.

“We’re all clear,” Keith said. His cheeks were very pink. Lance stared at him, still panting a bit. Keith seemed to be waiting for something. He’d shoved the helmet back on his head in a hurry, so his thick hair was completely crushed beneath it, sticking out at weird angles. He was carrying his coat gingerly in his hurt arm, which Lance would feel bad about, later, and the black under-armour of their Paladin uniform reflected the ambient light from the stars in strange, glossy ways. He glowed. Lance couldn’t tear his eyes away.

“Uhm.” Keith did seem to be waiting for something. “You can let go of my hand now.”

“Oh. Ah.” Lance looked down to where he was still kind of admittedly crushing Keith’s fingers in a death grip. He quickly let go. “You probably need those,” he said. “You know, ‘cuz your other hand is all, uhm, you know.” He flailed.

“Full of glass?” Keith finished, a ghost of smile crossing his eyes. Lance tried to keep it inside, face contorting. It was so stupid. Everything they’d just done, the run, the arguing, the fight, the second fight, the past three hours of his life, the past three months of his life, was just. So. Stupid. 

Both boys burst out laughing, sitting on the cold ground behind a weird rock on an alien planet.

“You punched him right in the face, dude!” Lance shouted when he could form coherent words again. “You punched him right in the face with a freaking glass, and then you did it again Keith! Like, he didn’t even see it coming!” He collapsed into giggles, remembering it.

“I know, I know, it was so-” Keith snorted. “Did you see how I dropped him?! One punch, Lance, one punch!”

“And then the heads, you were like,” Lance pantomimed smashing two coconuts against each other, “Kra-kow! And then you were like, totally cool, like you didn’t just go all Batman on everyone! You’re crazy!” 

“What do you call that thing with the dog, then?” Keith slapped Lance’s shoulder. 

“That was not a dog!” Lance half-protested. “That was a rhino with a hormonal imbalance!”

“You cleared it with a foot to spare!”

“Heck yeah I did! And the world was still all gooey too!”

“Yeah, Parush beer will kick your ass. All of their stuff is like that too,” Keith laughed. “The first time I tried it, Kaneh didn’t warn me or anything, I thought I was going to die!”

“What even is it?” 

“It’s like alcohol, I think, but Miroosh was really vague about it when I asked her. Everyone has their own recipe or something, it’s like the colonist’s national drink and there are a lot of different types.”

“Gosh.” Lance watched the way Keith ran his fingers over his knuckles, gently prodding at the scabs forming there. Eye contact wasn’t really their thing, even this giggly. “And we took out a whole Parush death squad on the stuff.”

“Couldn’t have done it without your long jumping skills,” Keith laughed.

“What can I say, the one thing I’m good at is running away.” The adrenaline was fading. Lance focused back on Keith. “You totally took care of them though. You kicked their freaking _butts_.”

“Not all of them,” Keith hummed. The gleam of fight and flight that had been shining in both their eyes had largely dulled. He took off his helmet and ran his fingers through his hair. Lance normally thought he did that to look cool (narcissistic asshole) but right now, Lance wondered if he was nervous. “I mean, Karokan is- he’ll be back you know?”

“What is he? Some sort of gang leader?”

“Worse,” Keith wrinkled his nose. “He used to be a part of their version of law enforcement, before the Galra came. Originally they were on the side of the local government, but Karokan sold out. Turned the entire department into a branch of the Galran army. Now, he runs the whole protection racket scam. You know, pay us half your rent each week or we’ll run you out of town? And the Galra back him up- Akara can’t do anything officially without running the risk of being shut down.”

Lance nodded. He’d heard the story before. A lot of the distress signals the Paladins of Voltron had responded to in the past few months had been only tangentially related to the Galra. It turns out, having its central government overtaken by blank-faced empire builders left a really big power vacuum. Sometimes they found out the Galra were funding one or both sides. A lot of the time, it was just plain old greed and corruption. There wasn’t much the Paladins could do; Lance wasn’t even sure how much the Paladins _should_ be doing. He was going to say something, he didn’t even know- supportive? But Keith continued.

“And I’m so cooped up in the Castle, Lance, it was driving me nuts.” Lance frowned. Keith’s tone had been shifting down, going from giddy to almost wistful. Like he really was drunk, and his secrets were spilling out of him. “And then Hunk made the trainer all lame, I just, I just needed something to do, you know? Karokan and his lackeys, they’re like, exactly what Voltron should stand against. Fighting them is... It’s amazing. I can’t even think during the day, but coming out here...” he trailed off. He was glowing but. But.

Lance had been driving himself insane, cooped up in the Castle with nothing but his guilt and a bucket of sanitizer. Normally, even if he felt useless or worthless or just plain stupid, he at least had Voltron, the team, to focus on. When they weren’t fighting off the massive evil empire literally sitting on their doorstep, they weren’t supposed to be caught up in cleaning or a billion repairs. It was their downtime! They deserved a break, but because of Lance’s stupid, stupid decisions, they were stuck on a shitty planet fixing things that weren’t supposed to break in the first place.

And yet, here was Keith, slacking off from getting the Castle back to working condition, playing fucking vigilante with the colonists. He was going to get them killed. He was going to get _himself_ killed. The anger that had driven Lance to follow him out here in the first place really wanted to come back up. The look in Keith’s eyes, though, wistful and vulnerable and glowing, kept it mostly down. Disgust curled in his stomach, instead.

“So this is what you’ve been doing?” he asked, instead of yelled. Keith raised his eyebrows. “Beating up the local constabulary in the dead of night in exchange for free magic mushroom drinks and concussions?”

“I know, I just- I couldn’t just watch, Lance.” Keith stared out, into the sandstone. “It’s not just the fighting it’s... We see this shit on so many planets, and we can’t help any of them when we’re stuck out here,” Lance winced, “But I could help Akara and their bar. I could... I can make some sort of difference here. It’s worth the headache.”

Lance heard what Keith was saying. Lance understood what Keith was saying. Lance also knew that it was fucking stupid. 

“You’re going to get a hell of a lot worse than a headache, Keith.” The red Paladin’s face fell, darkened. 

“I can handle myself.”

“Bullshit!” Lance grabbed Keith’s glass-filled hand. They still needed to get back to the Castle, back to real running water, Lance still had a job to do. Stupid stupid stupid! How could he have let himself get distracted by Keith’s stupid face and stupid vigilante justice and stupid romantic chases through alien cities? He was here to- to bring Keith back to reality, to keep the most ridiculously reckless, self-sacrificing member of the team _safe_. “You got this, by yourself! You got those black eyes, and probably broken knuckles, and definitely those cracked ribs, by yourself! You obviously can’t handle it yourself, Keith. We barely made it out of there tonight, and that was together!”

“Yeah, and whose fault was that?” Keith yanked his hand away, wincing. He stood, turned. Lance recoiled like he’d been stung. He knew Keith was right. If he hadn’t been distracting, hadn’t got them talking, Keith could’ve been out of there sooner, or hidden, or something. Keith stood, suddenly, and began to pace back and forth in their little hidey-hole, rubbing his bandaged hand gently.

Lance set his mouth in a hard line to get it to stop quivering. He’d had enough. He’d walked into this with a plan, a really good one, and maybe he’d gone a bit off book but fucking Keith tended to make that happen. He needed to end this, even if it hurt. After all, that’s what doctors did, right? You have to set the bone before it can begin to heal. 

“What would Allura say if she knew you were doing this?” Lance said, barely above a whisper. He knew where to hit Keith where it hurt. It might make the red Paladin hate him, after all the “bonding” they’d just gone through but, if he didn’t get into any more stupid fights, it would be worth it. “What would Shiro say?” Keith visibly flinched.

“Fuck you, Lance,” he said. His voice was very quiet. Dangerous. “Don’t you even- Fuck you.”

“They’d agree with me, and you know it. You’re being stupid, Keith,”

“Lance.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed-”

“ _Lance._ ”

“You’re going to get yourself killed, and,” Lance’s mind was racing. He knew why Keith was fighting. He knew a lot more than anyone gave him credit for. If there was one thing he was good at ( _running away. putting on bandaids._ ), it was watching Keith. He knew the way the fucking bastard worked. He pushed forward.

“And you’re not even fighting for them, Keith. You’re fighting for yourself!” Keith rushed forward, slammed Lance against the harsh cliff wall. Lance wondered if he’d remembered which hand was hurt. 

“Say that again, I dare you,” Keith hissed.

“You’re fighting for yourself.” Lance spat the words like they burned, and Keith dropped him, half pushing the blue Paladin onto the ground with the force of his letting go. He walked away from Lance, walked away from the words. 

“You’re fighting because you don’t know what else to do!” Lance called after him. Keith kept walking, slow from the long run and the fights, but determined. He didn’t look back. It pissed Lance off, pushed him from hard truth into cruelty. 

“It’s all you know how to do!” he yelled at the bright red of Keith’s back. “It’s all you’re good for, Kogane, and you know it! You’re nothing more to the team than a fucking set of fists!”

Keith found a foothold that would bring him over the crest of the thin, hidden trail, mounted it, and vanished from Lance’s sight.

 

\-----------------------------------

 

Lance was “working”, which at the moment, meant pretending to clean the kitchen while sitting on a stool and staring at his own reflection in the oven door. His legs hurt worse than that time he’d turned all the showers onto freezing cold just in time for Keith to take one, and then gawked long enough at the red Paladin’s complete lack of reaction, allowing Shiro to catch him and make him run laps around the training deck for three hours. Okay, maybe they didn’t hurt that bad.

Whatever was in Space New Jersey’s trippy acid beer definitely turned Lance into an actual monster. He literally couldn’t think of any other excuse for the previous night. As soon as he’d woken up that morning - after hiking through weird desert mountains and getting lost in the hills twice, no thanks to Keith, _and_ tripping over the airlock again getting back into the Castle, he’d pretty much passed out as soon as his head hit his pillow - shame felt like it was billowing out his very ears. He had slept through breakfast, missing everyone before they went off to do Important Repair Things, and the resulting loneliness really hadn’t helped. Lance kept replying the previous night in his head. He couldn’t stop. The embarrassment, the bizarre shift from adrenaline rush fueled giggles to moral indignation to abject cruelty in ten minutes flat, it was enough to make his head spin. And his head was spinning! Why hadn’t he thought to ask Keith about the hangover _before_ calling out his martyr complex? 

Lance watched the oven forlornly. It was really his only friend these days. So warm, so dark, so capable of creating yummy things.

He wouldn’t really go to Allura. Maybe Shiro but... Lance knew he was bluffing, in the end. He couldn’t sell out anyone like that, much less his own teammate. Even if the lecture would be full of delicious schadenfreude to watch. Even if it was for his own good. Lance sighed and knocked his forehead into the oven door.

“Hey.” Lance just about fell off his stool at the sound of Keith’s voice. He flailed, found his balance, turned.

“What do you want?” He looked around, found only his spray bottle for a weapon, and brandished his menacingly. “I warn you, I’m armed!”

Keith rolled his eyes. He walked into the room, arms crossed tight over his chest. 

“Look, about last night...” Keith started. Lance froze.

“I- I didn’t mean-”

“You can’t tell Shiro or Allura. About any of it.” Lance couldn’t see a trace of the glow that seemed to envelope Keith last night. He wanted to say a lot of things. The imps that lived in his brain and enjoyed ruining his life beat him to the punch.

“What are you gonna do? Hit me?” Keith turned aside, as if Lance had smacked him. 

“What do you want?”

“I-” _What do you want?_ This meant so much to Keith, to ‘deals are useless’ Keith, to ‘we don’t bargain with Galra’ Keith, to ‘don’t bother talking to them, just leave me here to die’ Keith, that he was willing to offer something to Lance. _What do you want?_ Lance wanted a lot of things. But he knew that none of them were the point here. None of them would be _right_.

“I just want you to stay safe.” It was a lie. Keith could feel it, too. “You need to stop getting hurt.”

“And how do you want me to do that? Find some bubble wrap before I take on Karokan’s massive fucking hammer?” he asked, dripping with sarcasm. Lance opened his mouth, paused, swallowed. Fucking Keith, he thought. Asking all the hard questions. The imps rose up again.

“Let me come with you.” Fuck, fuck, fuck that was not what he meant to say. Lance continued to dig his own grave. “I’ll stay back until you get your ass kicked and then do, you know, damage control. Come in as back-up when you need it.” He looked around, unable to keep his eyes on Keith’s flabbergasted face. “Keith, you just gotta take me with you.”

It was Keith’s turn to stutter. Finally, he set his jaw, decision made.

“Fine.” It felt like some massive hulking bird, which Lance hadn’t even noticed was there, finally took flight off of his shoulders. Keith wasn’t done yet, though. “Fine, but you have to promise me some things. We have to have _rules_.”

“Good! Yes! We do!” Lance nodded, bounding up to Keith and grabbing the other boy’s arms without thinking about it. “But you have to promise me, okay? No going out in the middle of the night without me. No doing this alone. Okay?” He looked into the red Paladin’s huge brown eyes. Whatever Keith saw, looking back, made his face glimmer for just a second before pulling back into the mask.

“Fine,” he said. “I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This only took me three months to write, so the next chapter should be ready around... January?


	5. Overstimulation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith wasn't sure why he kept letting Lance come with. It could be that he needed backup. Or the way Lance's gaze set every nerve in his body on fire. Either one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love hurts, but not as bad as the decisions made in this chapter. Please note the new tags and rating change!

After the talk in the kitchen, things hadn’t actually gotten any better. As it turned out, threats to tell mom and dad followed by begrudging agreements against bodily harm didn’t really help a relationship blossom. Four days and two of Keith’s crazy-ass missions later, Lance was certain things had gotten worse.

“Pidge, I’m dying,” Lance moaned. “Keith is such a dick and he’s going to die, what do I do?”

“Fuck if I know.” She was lounging in her corner of the rec room, which was about half computer bits, half Rover, who she took apart to tinker with when she was bored. Pidge was bored as hell at the moment, but she opted to see how far back she could lean in her rolly chair without tipping it instead of putting poor Rover back together. Altean tech tended to do silly things like “progressive balancing”, and she’d been training the sensors for weeks. Lance rolled around on the couch, groaning in a way that suggested ‘sever diarrhea’ rather than ‘relationship drama’. He was always so dramatic. No wonder he and Keith worked so well together.

“Weren’t you the one who wanted to play doctor to begin with?” Pidge asked. “Innuendo fully intended.”

“It’s not playing doctor! Do you want to hear what that _dumbass_ did yesterday?” 

“You’re going to tell me even if I say no.”

“It was like, just after sunset, right? And because of that weird beer stuff they turn on all the lights just after the sun goes down, normal and everything, you know? Except, the Galra blockade is like making lightbulbs or whatever those little colored light things are hard to get, so when people run out they have to either suck it up or buy more from the government, who are supposed to ration them out, but of course Karokan is the one supposed to be rationing them so he won’t give any out unless people pay like, a billion dollars or are his best friends or whatever. Well evidently Keith heard about this and so of course, his dumb ass decides to go in and steal a bunch of lightbulbs! And I had to help!”

“Exciting.”

“No, Pidge, not exciting! Because Karokan is a psychic asshole and put armed guards around the storehouse! And the lights turn on whenever they’re exposed to carbon dioxide, except no one freakin’ told us that, so as soon as we started running _from the freakin’ lazer blasts_ they lit up! And you know what Keith decided to do?”

“Something dumb?”

“He pushed me over a wall! And threw his box down on top of me!” Lance rolled onto his stomach and propped himself up on the arm of the couch. He had a crazed look in his eyes. “I don’t think you get it Pidge. Keith freaking- he tried to take down three armed Parushkani down with just his knife! Knives don’t work against lazers, Pidge!”

“That sounds fucking badass.”

“It was stupid!”

“Well you’re both alive, right? I saw Keith like, an hour ago.”

“Yeah, because I saved him! Akara’s was like around the corner from there so I dropped the lights off and grabbed Miroosh, by the time we got back Keith had gotten himself _shot_ already because that's just what happens when you leave him alone for more than ten minutes down there! Aghh!” Lance buried his face in the armrest. Pidge grimaced. She had it on good authority that someone had farted there a bunch last week, when Coran’s team Status Report and Fun Session was going really long and Hunk’s admittedly awesome space-cabbage rolls were being digested. But Lance seemed to need the catharsis that comes from yelling into a couch cushion.

“That's rough, buddy,” she said. “Hey, do you think you could get us some of those lights? Hunk could probably synthesize some, he's finished with most of Coran’s list and I think he's getting bored.”

“Oh,” Lance said, looking up from his fart-cushion therapy. “That's a pretty good idea!” He too had been evicted from the kitchen until dinner. Hunk had decided to find a better all-purpose gas for heating and cooling the fridge/stove/oven combo, and while he hadn’t threatened anyone _per se_ , he'd made it very clear that any Paladin in the vicinity of the kitchen ran a serious risk of losing their eyebrows. Lance liked his eyebrows, personally. Space had taken its toll but he'd gotten surprisingly okay at threading in the last few months. Lance rolled off the couch and onto his feet.

“I can run down there now, before Akara hands out everything we got last night. My eyebrows thank you, Pidge!” Lance shot out of the rec room.

She waited for the sound of his feet pounding back into the doorway.

“I have more about Keith, though, so don’t think we’re done talking!” He looked around, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Okay, later!”

“Later.” Pidge wiggled her fingers as he went around the corner. She’d gotten her chair down almost to a ninety degree angle. Stretching her arms over her head, she waited a beat, and then called out: “You can come in now, he’s gone.”

Keith walked almost silently through the other door of the rec room. He pouted, or at least he did in Pidge’s head, since she could only see his legs. But she heard his arms cross.

“Your face is really red.”

“Yeah, and you’re a wimpy baby.”

“Shut up.” He walked around and sat down on the back of the couch. “How’d you know I was there?”

“Proximity alerts,” Pidge had tapped into the Castle’s native system ages ago, mostly so Allura wouldn’t catch her giving the mice rides on Rover. That was a lecture none of them had recovered from. Subversive drag-racing on Galra tech aside, getting pinged every time the Paladins moved between rooms was kinda useful. Pidge liked keeping tabs. It made her feel secure. Lance and Hunk would be weird about it, but Mr Sneaky In a Crop Top had just as bad a thing for spying as she did, so why not make it mutual? Together-spying was better than spying alone. 

“I turned those off.”

“And I turned them back on again. _Ba-aby_.” 

“Fuck off, Pidge.” Pidge smirked. 

“Wimpy mullet baby is avoiding Lance so he doesn’t have to talk about his _fee-eelings_.”

Keith kicked out a leg and sent the rolly chair back just far enough to completely kill its balance. The floaters jerked towards the desk and Pidge fell backwards with a squawk. She barely kept her glasses on while she flailed back up on her knees.

“Assault doesn’t make you any less of a wimp!”

“I’m not being a wimp,” Keith was smirking now. He plopped down on the couch and poked on the Altean flatscreen with his toe. The tech was woefully outdated, but picked up the local broadband signal fine after a few kicks from Allura. Parush TV was more radio with pretty colors than anything else, but Keith seemed to like it fine.

“You’re totally avoiding him though.”

“He’s an idiot.” Keith sighed. “A dramatic idiot.”

“So you didn’t get yourself cornered by some Parush thugs?”

“No, I definitely kicked their asses,” Keith unsheathed his knife and started quietly sharpening it. “But there was only one laser gun between them, and it was a lucky shot. Barely grazed me.”

“Shiro is gonna be pissed when he hears you got shot.”

“Shiro isn’t gonna know,” Keith humphed. The whetstone made a very light _shink_ noise every time he drew the blade across its face. “That’s the whole _point_ of letting Lance come with.”

“What’s stopping me from telling?” Keith sent a glare her way. Pidge continued. “I’m just saying, dude. Lance is dramatic as shit, but he has a point.”

“What, that I should stop saving innocent people from a gang of pseudo-military thugs?”

“You know what I mean, dude.” Pidge came over to the couch and draped herself across the armrest. She liked the height. “Getting shot doesn’t help anyone.” Keith hummed. He didn’t meet her eye. She waited.

“I guess...” he trailed off, after a solid minute of almost silence. The ambient Castle noises barely occurred to them now. Instead, it was the soft whirring of the fan that cooled Pidge’s desk, and the shink-shink-shink of the knife that made up their background. 

“I guess, I just.” He tried again. “I don’t have anything better to do, you know? We’re stuck here, Shiro and Allura are taking forever... The least I can do is help the people I can, and...”

“And?”

“And. I don’t know.” A small grin cracked in the corners of Keith’s lips. “Lance needs something to do when he comes with.” Pidge flicked his arm. 

“Ow!”

“You’re so stupid!” she said. “Both of you!”

 

Keith couldn’t decide between the shirts on his bed. He crossed his arms. It was because of that conversation with Pidge, he decided. And the one with Hunk. And when Shiro had called him over the comm line because Hunk had told him to ‘check in on Keith’ and saw the bandage around his arm. 

“You got shot.”

“Sorry?”

“I- hrmph.” Shiro had sighed, covered his face with his human hand. “I really should be angry with you, Keith.”

“But you’re just disappointed, I know, I know.” Keith had crossed his arms tightly over his chest, feeling the plasticky bandage. He hadn’t wanted to look Shiro in the eye.

“I really should be.” Keith looked up. Shiro had moved to rest his head on his palm, leaning on the consul. “But Keith- Are you helping people? Really, really making a difference?”

“I- Yeah, I think so.” Keith nodded. “I’m trying to.”

“Then I’m proud,” Shiro said. A soft smile lit up his entire face. All the fear released from Keith’s chest, and he felt his shoulders relax. “You’re doing good down there. And you’re finally getting along with Lance!”

“Er- Yeah, that. Definitely getting along with Lance.” Keith grimaced.

“Well, that’ll come with time.” Shiro looked full on into the camera. “Good work Keith. But stay safe!”

“I will, I will.” After a few more assurances that _yes_ , Keith would try not to get shot in the future, and _yes_ , he’d come ask Shiro for help if anything happened or he needed advice, the conversation ended. 

That’s when the fear kicked in. Because, really, he should tell Lance to fuck off back to Blue, he had no leverage any more. But Keith didn’t. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to think about why he couldn’t, or why when Lance poked his head into Red’s cockpit and asked if they were meeting in Keith’s room at the same time that night, Keith had only said “Yeah, whatever.”

Not, “Yeah whatever, I don’t need you anymore.” Not, “No, Lance, get out of my Lion.” Just, “Yeah, whatever.” The sort of non-committal response that Lance took as one-hundred-percent affirmative and grinned at him on his way out.

So they’d be heading back out tonight, together. Fuck.

“You ready to-- Why are you naked?” Lance was staring at him from the doorway. Keith felt the blood rush into his cheeks.

“I’m still deciding which shirt to wear, fuck. But there, I chose.” He grabbed a shirt and shoved it over his head.

“Wait, really?” Lance walked into his room like he owned it. Keith resisted the urge to push him out. “I thought you only had one shirt?”

“Are you kidding me?” Keith grabbed the top piece of his under-armor and shimmied into it, carefully smoothing down the shirt underneath. “I own like six. From that mall on Aramak?”

“But they’re all black! You’re Keith, you only ever wear black!” Lance seemed like he was having an existential crisis. In Keith’s bedroom. Yep, normal night in the Castle. Keith cinched the under-armor and it became skin-tight with a hiss.

“Three of them are navy, Lance.” Keith rolled his eyes. “I thought you actually cared about this fashion shit.”

“Oh my god, that’s even worse.” Lance sat down on Keith’s bed. “You’re honestly telling me you own six copies of the exact same shirt, in two different colors?”

“Can we just go?”

“ _Oh my god_.”

 

The high desert air was cool against his neck. Keith sighed. Kaneh had told him that the planet would get colder when the season changed, but he hadn’t realized they’d been here so long. They hadn’t stayed on a single planet like this since Arus. He wasn’t fond of it or anything, but the mesa had reminded him of Earth so strongly the first time he’d walked down into them, he’d had to sit down and breath. Reddish sandstone soaring around you, cliffs carved out of a once flat piece of land by water now hidden deep under the earth. It even smelled like the mesa, this far out from the city. Once they got close, sure, the stink of industry would take over but the ten, twenty minute walk now that he had to wait for Lance, was straight out of the Black Mesa. Every time they turned a corner, he half-expected to see a soaring ridge of red-green mountain to rise across the horizon. It made Keith itch for his bike. Red was an amazing machine, but his little three-wheeler was made for the intricate valleys and flat plains of Izarush. 

Lance caught up to him, puffing.

“It’s just over this wall, right? Keith, oh my god, please tell me it’s just over this wall.”

“Close,” Keith said. He took off again, around the corner he knew would lead him to the city. Why did he bring Lance again? It would’ve been so fucking easy to tell him off, or even just to sneak out before Lance had finished gossiping with Hunk in Yellow’s Hangar, or whatever those two did after dinner. For some reason, thinking about Lance and Hunk hanging out for hours every evening made Keith’s stomach clench. He thrust all thoughts about non-Vigilante things out of his head. 

They came to the city limits. Keith pulled his jacket tighter around him, surveyed the flat outer walls. The Parush’kan didn’t have an actual fort set-up, but they kept to the city’s boundaries with a passion. A line of buildings all set to the same edge was almost as good a defense as any real wall. Kaneh had told him that some of the cities back on Parush, the colonists’ home planet, had massive trenches around their borders, moats going down almost past the planet’s crust, in perfectly straight lines. Keith wondered if they were doing the whole sacred geometry thing. The sudden shift between wilds and civilization was almost transcendental after a few sips of Parush beer.

Lance didn’t know any of that, though. Whenever Kaneh started in on one of his rambling stories about the home planet, Lance seemed to turn sour, physically turn his body away. Hell, whenever Kaneh started talking, Lance would roll his eyes and eventually wander off to bother Akara. It was weird. Keith didn’t care that much, but Kaneh was sort of his friend, and Lance was the one always nagging him about being polite.

The sun had set hours ago, and Akara’s bar was already packed and filled with swirling, orange-pink-red light. Lance kept close to his side as they gently shoved their way up to the bar.

Miroosh was working it, which was a good sign. She grinned when Lance waved.

“Humans!” she laughed. “We kicked that tlapi-bastard’s ass up and down the street last night!” She sloshed two thin glasses of a thick green liqueur down in front of them. “Drinks on me tonight!”

“Keith and Lance drink free every night,” Kaneh called down the bar. “Find something else to thank them with!”

“Your safety is thanks enough,” Keith said. “We’re just glad to help.”

“The free booze helps, though!” Lance cut in. “To kicking Karokan’s ass!”

The cheer went through the bartenders, and a few happily tripping patrons around them. Keith ran his fingers through his hair. The crowds made him uncomfortable, especially when they seemed to be paying attention to him. He actually preferred the bar empty, private, but he’d never say it aloud. Akara’s was important in the city, it let people know that you could refuse Karokan and survive. Every day, the ‘tlapi-bastard’ lost more and more ground.

Lance had emptied his glass of green stuff, and was grinning as Miroosh poured him more. He wiggled his eyebrows and she laughed. The lights deepened into their next cycle, shades of green and blue that could make the room spin after you’ve gotten used to red. Someone, Tiempe maybe, was pushing the green tonight. It danced through Lance’s hair, across the bridge of his nose, mixed with the green in his glass. No wonder he wore that jacket all the time, Keith thought. Lance knew what looked good on him. His lips were thin, boyish, and Keith couldn’t stop think about the drops that still glittered across them, catching the light.

It was an odd feeling, really. Keith had been attracted to people before, but not like this. Sometimes, almost randomly, warmth would bloom deep in his gut, just behind his lowest ribs, like a muscle relaxing under a heating pad. A gentle tingle would rise up his neck, his mouth would go dry. Lance was an idiot, so he could get away with watching him for ages before the other paladin would notice, if he did at all. When Keith took a sip of the Parush drink in front of him, he barely noticed the colors bursting across his eyes. If anything, they made Lance’s neck more supple, his cheeks softer. He set the glass down gently, barely even hearing the thrumming beat of the bar.

“Don’t look now, but Karokan just set the door on fire.” Keith jumped to his feet and whirled around in a circle, wild eyed. 

“Fuck! Where?” He couldn’t see any fire. In fact, he couldn’t see Karokan, or any of his goons. Just a few fellow patrons giving him some serious side-eye. Keith turned back towards the bar. His eyebrows were sunk to just above his eyes, which would normally invoke a Clint Eastwood reference from Lance, if Lance were paying attention. Instead, it was Kaneh who was smiling slyly from behind the counter.

“Don’t get up too quickly now,” he said, and put the glass he was wiping down back under the bar. “You’ll catch someone with that knife.”

Keith re-sheathed the offending weapon, which had gotten into his hand at some point. He begrudgingly sat back on a blocky stool.

“Ooh, don’t pout at me like that,” Kaneh crooned. He reminded Keith of Pidge half the time, if Pidge was an alien bartender with pretty hair. Keith could respect good hair. Maybe he and Lance were similar in that way. Kaneh’s hair was gorgeous, silvery-grey like most of the colonists and almost feathery. Lance would probably ask him what product he used, once he got over his weird grudge, because Lance cared about stuff like that. Once, Keith had used a handful of his shampoo and Lance had almost stabbed him with his own sword. That was a good day.

“You’re thinking about him again. I can tell.” Keith looked up at Kaneh, sharply.

“What?”

“That look in your eyes! I’m not a hyu-man but love has a universal face.”

“I- Who the fuck are you talking about?” Kaneh laughed. 

“I’m just saying! You and Lance! You’re not exactly subtle.” Kaneh turned to grab a drink order called out by someone just off Keith’s right, made a double, and slid the extra in front of Keith. The Paladin regarded it carefully. Kaneh seemed to be having fun testing the limits of human body chemistry, and the timing was...suspicious. He took a gentle sip before answering.

“What are you implying?” It was Kaneh’s turn to look suspicious.

“Your species does have sex, right? I’m not misreading this?”

Keith choked on the brownish drink, only barely covering his mouth in time. It took him a second to get composed enough to swallow the rest, and as soon as his throat was free, he was yelling.

“I do not--!” Keith realized Lance was sitting like, three feet away from him. He leaned up on the bar, close enough to whisper in Kaneh’s face. “I do _not_ want to have sex with Lance!”

“You want to do something to him though, right?” Kaneh raised one silky brow. “Quarry nurse at your tragic side, and all that?”

“I don’t even know what that means!” Keith drank down the rest of the drink, which as the light shifted up to yellows, turned orange. His brain turned pink. “What the hell did I just put in my mouth?”

“Mix of Ishtaran Campe, sparkling L’ahm juice, and good ol’ Quarry Water,” Kaneh rattled off. “And come on! I saw you staring at him. You bought the old ‘curtain on fire’ trick, you were staring so hard.”

Keith squinted some more. Maybe it would make Kaneh stop being stupid. Kaneh put another pink drink in front of him, and he sipped it. It tasted better that time. He glanced at Lance out of the corner of his eye, who was still talking to Miroosh. Kaneh grabbed some more customers, giving Keith enough time to finish his drink, and then stopped by with another one.

Normally, Keith didn’t get drunk when he went into the town. At least, not until after he’d clocked Karokan a good one. It helped that Parush beer was, while wildly hallucinogenic, not nearly as intoxicating as alcohol. It tended to fade quickly. But...

Kaneh was stupid. Most people were stupid, but perceptive people like Kaneh were even worse. Because he’d had a _point_. Keith had been wondering why on Earth (or not, as the case really was), he’d let Lance come tonight. And Lance’s face was. Wow. 

Keith wasn’t one for poetry, except in journals that he’d burned after his second year in high school. But Lance’s eyes, the way he moved, the face he made when he was laughing, or when he thought Keith was being stupid, or when he was putting bandaids across his cheekbones and rambling about how cool they’d both been. Just. Wow. 

Lance had attracted another few Parush’kan to his place on the bar, and not just the lithe, elvish Akush like Kaneh and the other bartenders, but a rocky Ushan. They made up about half of the bar’s patrons, and most of the colony, but were unbelievably hard to talk to. Keith hadn’t even bothered trying, and yet, there Lance was. Flirting? Just telling a joke _so funny_ it could make a stone faced Ushan giggle? Spreading peace and love throughout the galaxy? 

Either way, Keith was proud. And fucked. So, so fucked.

When Kaneh came back around with a fifth drink in hand, Keith was face down on the bar, groaning into his hands and watching the pink blossoms in his head. Kaneh rested his chin on his fist, supported by his sharp, bony elbow. 

“You don’t look so good, hyu-man,” said the alien.

“Agrhhh,” said Keith. Kaneh considered that, just maybe, he should have mentioned that Campe was a different type of booze than he’d been normally giving Keith, and that even Akara could get overstimulated by it, the massive pole through their neck dissolving as the herby liquor began to amplify emotions, wants and needs. He figured the poor thing needed a break, though. From feelings, which he didn’t seem to be very used to, as well as sobriety. If the two humans weren’t so young and cute together, Kaneh would help Keith take a break from abstinence, too. Oh, well. They had been saving the bar a lot of time and trouble, and Keith was a sweetheart underneath the silly hairstyle and casual attitude towards barfights.

“If it makes you feel better, I think he likes you back,” Kaneh told him. Keith looked up, squinting in a less ‘angry ranger’ way and more a ‘trying to pick your face out from the identical pink copies’ way. 

“Really. He glares whenever I do so much as smile at you. In fact-” Keith watched Kaneh wave at Lance and Miroosh, who poked Lance for him. As soon as the Paladin made eye contact, he frowned. Keith put his head back on the table.

“Ughhh.” A warm hand set down between his shoulderblades.

“Hey, is this guy bothering you?” Lance asked. His voice was soft, warm, tipsy. It made Keith feel all goopy inside. 

“Someone can’t hold his Campe,” Kaneh said. He laughed, and Keith wondered if he was imagining Lance growling, or if Blue was just projecting again. 

“Yeah, I don’t know what that is, but I think he’s had enough. Right, Keith?” Keith looked up again. Backlit, Lance looked like some minor god. The lights glittered off his cheekbones, which Keith had never really looked at before, in just the right way. Like it was coming from his invisible pores, from behind his eyes. The hand on his back moved under his arm and helped him up from the bar.

“Woah,” Lance reached out as Keith wobbled, steadied them both on the almost tipping stool. “Definitely had enough.” 

The two paladins took the back way out of the club, ducking through a curtain and past Akara. They were scrolling through a long document on a paper-thin datapad. Without looking up, they gently touched Lance’s shoulder to get his attention.

“The lightbulbs, has your friend synthesized them yet?” 

Lance whirled about, accidentally sending Keith into a cabinet. Drunken squawking filled the backroom as Keith attempted to regain his balance and failed, finally coming to rest on Akara’s outstretched arm. The red Paladin took the opportunity to pull his brain out of swirling pink.

“What lightbulbs?” Keith wasn’t sure if he was slurring his words, so he tried again. “Why d’ja get lightbulbs for?” Lance flushed, caught Akara’s eye and looked away.

“It was just an idea, Hunk is still working on them.” Akara nodded, raised an eyebrow at Keith. “I think he’s drunk, I really, well. We should really be getting back.” 

Lance grabbed Keith’s hand and pulled the boy towards him. 

“Be cautious. This town is not kind to Karokan’s enemies.” Akara watched their backs as the two paladins stepped out into the orange-tinged night.

 

The grainy night air hung thick in the city’s alleys, but there was no freakin’ way Lance was taking a main street. Like every subjugated piece of the Galra empire, there was no safety in public here. No one would have your back, and there was too big a chance of collateral damage.

On the topic of a lack of back-having, Lance thought as Keith grumbled as he was manhandled through an intersection, Keith was completely useless tonight. Lance could’ve sworn he’d only looked away for an instant, taken a few minutes to socialize with the locals, but it was long enough for Keith to get magically, utterly wasted.

It was probably Kaneh’s fault, Lance decided. Keith had played a part, but Kaneh was definitely the main actor here. Maybe something about a ‘k’ in your name just completely destroyed your common sense. 

Keith was conscious enough to walk and grumble about it, but Lance was having trouble getting him to go in straight lines. Between the rats-nest of alleys and Keith’s meandering, a few minute’s jog to the city border seemed to take ages. Lance was quiet, on-edge. While not as drunk as Keith, he certainly wasn’t sober, and becoming more aware of it by the second. He could feel a chill up his spine, a sure sign that Akara’s cryptic prediction was coming true. Luckily, he could see the sharp edge of the city coming up at the end of the street. From there, he’d just walk west till he saw the cliffs and be home free. 

The scrape of a heavy work boot over concrete was all the warning Lance had before a lazer shot sounded. Lance turned and pulled Keith close to him in one solid motion, felt his heart kick into gear as the bolt whipped through the air where Keith had been only a second before. Panic cut through him as he watched a grunt with a cannon the size of Hunk’s step from the shadows.

“I’ve got some luck today, don’t I?” the Ushan crowed. They raised the thick gun back to their shoulder and loaded it, the hum of its charging slicing sickly through the air. Lance swallowed, trying to think of something, anything to stall him with. He gripped Keith’s hand tight and begged his mind not to go blank.

Lance’s heart pounded so loudly in his chest that he almost didn’t hear the slick draw of Keith’s knife. He grabbed for the other boy but was easily ducked, shoved towards the street’s end. Keith lunged. 

The Ushan released the charge. Lance watched in terror as Keith took the shot in his thigh in order to come at the stocky colonist with a downward slash of his knife. Blue blood spurted from the wound. Yelling in pain and confusion, the Ushan pulled around and whipped Keith across the chest with their bulky gun.

“Fuck!” Keith went down hard into the dust. Lance moved before he thought. Crossing the distance in a heartbeat, he brought his fist down into the crook of the Ushan’s neck. They fumbled their half charged gun and Lance took the opportunity. He shoved the Ushan aside and positioned himself in between the them and Keith. The Ushan whipped the lazer gun back into the air and shot the charge wildly. It careened off a nearby wall and bounced into a doorway a block down the way, vanishing.

Lance didn’t wait for the Ushan to load another charge into the gun. He reached down and wrested Keith’s angrily glowing knife away, hissing as the grip stung his palm. The Ushan laughed. Lance felt perfectly sharp, even the memory of being drunk snapped out of his head. He feinted to the right and the Ushan turned, hefted the gun. Lance shifted his weight and the angle of his arm. He drove the thick blade into the colonists side as the lazer gun’s charge lifted its screaming whine into the night.

The Ushan huffed and fell back. Lance ripped the knife from their side. He knew it wasn’t enough to kill the colonist, just buy them a moment to get the hell out of there. As the Ushan began to huff and puff with rage, Lance ducked to the side and dragged Keith to his feet.

Keith wasn’t having it, but Lance’s eyes were on the colonist, who was stumbled back towards them. He started to run, dragging Keith along with him.

“We’ve gotta finish it off!” Keith yelped. “Fuck you!” He tried to shove the blue paladin away, but Lance held on. His eyes darted about for the doorway he’d seen before, the angle perfectly hidden from the street and ran like their asses depended on it. Instead of listening to Keith’s obnoxious posturing, Lance listened for the sound of the gun charging: 1, 2, 3--

_Zap!_ Lance watched the bolt pass as he breathed, one hand clamped over Keith’s mouth and the other holding him tight across the stomach, forcing the belligerent oaf to stay put. He held his breath and watched as the Ushan came hurtling past the squat alcove he’d pulled the two of them into without noticing them. Lance waited for the heavy, limping footsteps to peter out, and then a few beats more for good measure before he allowed himself to breathe again and relax his hold across Keith’s chest.

“Mmph!” Keith wriggled out of his arms and whirled around, his face flushed from liquor and anger. “I could’a had him! What the fuck?”

Lance’s mouth snapped open, ready to tell Keith back to whatever godforsaken Texan hole he’d crawled out of, but he held back, clenched his jaw shut. The sudden attack had shocked any haziness right out of his system, leaving him aching and desperately tired. He got to his feet and grabbed Keith roughly by the elbow.

“Hey! I didn’t say you could touch me!” Keith tried to push him off, but Lance wasn’t having it. He breathed his fear out through his nose and set off towards the city’s edge, out into the flat, blessedly quiet desert, Keith in tow.

 

Lance hadn’t said anything since they’d stepped into the hills, just shoved Keith’s knife flat against his chest and pushing past him to trudge towards the castle. Keith’s mouth was impossibly dry and the intoxicating rush of battle, infinitely amplified by the drug coursing through his brain, had faded to fuzzy neon spots at the edges of his vision and a constant urge to get Lance’s attention. His tongue hurt from the dehydration and overexertion, though, so he’d stopped pestering the other boy a few minutes into their journey.

He kicked a rock as they started gain altitude and the thin trees came up. Keith was antsy, wanted to giggle even though he knew, faintly, that Lance was royally pissed with him and he sorta deserved it. But he didn’t care, couldn’t care, and even though his leg ached with the sting of a lazer glance, he just wanted to feel Lance’s hungry eyes on him, run in circles, get in a fight. 

But of course, he couldn’t have any of that, with Lance’s current silent treatment against him. Keith wasn’t used to feeling so... selfish, so _okay_ with being selfish. He indulged in the temporary death of his conscience and let his eyes roll lazily across Lance’s hunched shoulders, down the man’s spine, across the silhouette of his thin hips and back. 

Without the angry swirl of his sober mind, Keith could admit that Kaneh had had something of a point about him and Lance. He couldn’t get the other paladin off his mind half the time, and it was driving him insane. The booze may have been amplifying it, but the need for Lance’s eyes on him, his interest, the constant chatter that burst from him whenever the quiet between them stretched too long, was all Keith. He’d called Lance an attention whore more than a couple times, but as they trudged the final few meters towards the castle, Keith was intimately aware that he’d been projecting.

And there was no better way of getting that delicious, lovely attention than provoking Lance. It wasn’t difficult. A smirk could set the other boy off (and they called Keith short tempered!), much less a huff in a mounting argument, or a casual insult. It felt like his skin was on fire, now especially. Whatever the fuck Kaneh had given him magnified every look, every grab, by a thousand. In return, Keith would watch Lance’s ridiculous face, the way his body seemed to puff up, and file every indignant word away for later.

Keith ignored the fact that Lance was the one doing the riling more than half the time, and that Keith would rise to his challenge with just as much predictability. His mind tended to go in strange places when Lance was around. Every insult, every joke, would lock itself in and he’d find himself hanging off of Lance’s voice, giving in to the almost painful urge to top him, to one-up the boy who’d declared himself Keith’s rival before they’d ever even met. 

This thing between them, down in the colonists’ city, was just another competition, he realized as Lance smacked the panel next to the airlock and opened up the hangar. Not only that, but Keith definitely had the upper hand-- Lance was out of leverage, wasn’t he? He’d let Lance come along tonight, and taken a lazer bolt for him, all out of the _goodness of his heart_.

And, you know. The one other time when Lance was as focused on Keith as he was when they fought, was when he was hovering above Keith to rub that bright blue bacitracin-chitosan gel onto whatever injury-of-the-day he’d gotten. It was that gaze, that intense focus that Lance took on when he was determined-- to get a win over Keith, to keep him from catching “space plague”, to kick his ass, either way.

Keith was docile as he followed Lance into the hangar bay, daydreaming about Lance’s hands, which Keith was pretty sure were about to be on his thighs. The lazer bolt was cheap, low-charge like all of the non-Galra weapons on this galaxial backwater, so it’d left a stubbly line of welts across the taut muscle of his thigh rather than the deep burning gash that a better weapon would have. It’d cauterized where it hit instead of cooking. Keith, if he was on his own, would only bother dressing it enough so that the welts wouldn’t catch on his underarmor when he moved. 

Lance was deliciously determined about these things, though. Keith played innocent when Lance gestured towards Blue’s massive paw. Lance rolled his eyes and nudged the red paladin in the direction of the makeshift seat, but turned away to pull the medikit out of his bag without following through. Keith was disappointed. He wanted Lance to grab him harder, shove him against the Lion without stopping to worry about Blue overhearing them. 

Ah, well, the Campe liquor supplied in his brain. Lance needed some provocation, then. He was drowsy but itching for Lance to turn back to him, to get in his face.

His pants were an obvious first choice. Lance would need to get to the wound, wouldn’t he? Keith hiked up his shirt and rolled the waistband of the stretchy black pants down, pulling it over the curve of his ass and just past the thick line across his thigh when Lance turned back, hands full. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Lance said, barely keeping the bottle of antibac in his hands as he got a face full of Keith, practically draped over Blue’s paw, pants rolled down around his knees. 

“Ya’ can’t fix me with them in the way, can you?” Keith watched as Lance’s cheeks went from their usual shade to a deep, vaguely terrified red in a moment. He cocked his hips. “I can take the rest off too if you--”

“No! Jesus, Keith, just,” Lance hurried towards him and set the bottle and bandages on the ground near Keith. He didn’t seem to know where to look or stand, but after a few beats of fumbling, he leaned down to mess with the bottle some more. “I know you’re a complete douchebag right now, but can you take this seriously for like ten seconds? I think that guy really got you.”

“Won’t know if you don’t take a look at it,” Keith teased, grinning unseen at Lance. “I mean, unless you’re too much of a fucking wimp to look at a lazer wound.” Lance’s look up at him sharply, lips curled. 

“I would be a sucky team medic if I was grossed out at your freaky chicken legs,” he finally shot back, eyes falling onto the wound. He ran his fingertip down the length, checking for breaks in the skin. Keith shivered at the feeling, but it wasn’t enough. He needed more.

“At least I can actually use mine.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Lance dabbed on a fingerful of the gel. It stinged more than normal, and Keith pulled away. Lance rose up on his knees and scootched forward to get a better angle, leaving himself off-balance and-- Keith attacked! In one foul swoop, he pushed Lance forward and pulled him in fully between his legs, wrapping his muscular calfs tight around Lance’s torso. The blue Paladin cursed and put a hand out to brace himself. Savouring the heat of Lance’s hand on his thigh, Keith preened with the contact. Victory!

“Dude!” Lance tried to pull back but failed, knocked the gel over with an errant leg and slipped even further into Keith’s trap from the resulting mess. “What the fuck are you doing? Let go of me!”

“Yeah, not feeling it,” Keith said. He paused, putting his pointer finger on his cheek in mockery of thought. “Maybe I’ll think about it if you admit that I could’ve totally taken that asshole back in the city.”

“Seriously?” Lance struggled against Keith’s grip. “Is now really the time for this?” He started pulling at Keith’s calfs. Keith answered by tightening his legs, pressing dangerously on Lance’s neck. “Fuck! Keith, I swear to God I’m gonna kill you, get off!” Keith laughed and ran a hand through Lance’s hair, taking both their weight precariously onto his one palm and his ass, perched against Blue. 

“As fucking if!”

“I swear!” Lance looked around wildly, grasping at words. “I’ll tell Shiro! About all of it, I swear to fuck!” 

That really got to Keith, the sweet irony of it all. He cackled, leaned back on Blue, pulling Lance a bit with him. 

“You do that!” 

“I will, I swear I will--”

“He already knows!” Keith giggled. His skin felt electric, every hair on edge. He could taste his heart pounding, the amazing energy of Lance as his hand tightened into a fist on Keith’s leg. Surely he’d snap, yell at him, throw Keith’s legs off and-- Keith didn’t care about the rest. He was fully immersed in the moment, the static he could almost see between the two of them. Keith snorted and repeated his grand reveal. “Shiro found out this morning!”

“What?” Lance fell back and Keith let him, catching him between his legs at the last second. “What are you saying? Why did you- What am I doing here?” He looked around wildly, eyes darting. The feeling began to fade, nausea and haziness rising again. Keith hummed and chased it, lips moving without a thought.

“What can I say?” Keith flexed his thighs and smirked, holding Lance tight in place. “I just like seeing you on your knees like this.”

Lance’s eyes tightened, face going somewhere painful and incomprehensible for a second before straightening into something flat and angry. His lips curled into a single harsh line. Keith could hear his teeth grinding at the curve of his jaw. The other paladin held his eye and then turned his head down, sharply. Lance swallowed. 

The bay felt very still. The high drained in a heartbeat, leaving only a deep, aching discomfort in Keith’s stomach. This was- That answer wasn’t what he wanted. Lance was supposed to push him down, rise to the challenge, put his hands on Keith some way, any way, as long as it made his entire mind light up in need. But he just looked wrong. His face wasn’t that of a fight, aggression and wild energy rising between them. It was broken, underneath. Wrong. Hurt. Keith’s legs went limp. He knew they were shaking from the exertion, his arms were beginning to as well, but the empty feeling of Lance’s pain was all-consuming. Lance seemed to make up his mind, teeth moving behind his tight lips.

“Fix your own damn leg,” Lance growled. He stood and took a single step back. Keith almost thought he would say something else, but Lance released the breath he held tight in his chest and left Keith leaning, breathless, against Blue’s massive paw.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This only took like what, four months to write? I haven't beta'd it yet but I'm releasing it anyways! Medical Duty almost got abandoned after s2 came out because things really went in another direction. If you commented, you saved this fic, seriously. And space malls are a thing! So I feel kind of redeemed.
> 
> I use a lot of OC names and terms in this chapter. "Parush" is the planet the colonists are from, and they're called Parush'kan (Parushkani pl.) as a species. The short, boxy ones (Karokan) are called Ushan, and the thin, elven ones (Akara) are called Akush. "Tlapi" is a slur for Ushan. There's nothing even remotely canon about any of this, I just got carried away, whoops. Akara has they/them pronouns, as well as the unnamed Ushan.
> 
> Ch. 6 is either going to be the last or second to last chapter! I have an E-rated Interlude to post too, which will be the next part of this 'series', and I might also write a porny coda, so be on the lookout for those!


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